Chief Technology Officer - US-Based at Toptal in Location not listed

About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce.

We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.

Position Description:

As Chief Technology Officer, you will drive execution for the product and engineering teams and put AI at the core of everything the company builds. You will own Toptal’s full technical architecture and you will build it AI-first—utilizing best practices for agentic engineering. AI is not a workstream inside the engineer team—its core to it.

You will create and own the AI architecture and best practices the rest of the company utilizes. You will also own the initiatives that put agents into production. You should know how to build and fine-tune foundation models from the ground up, how to engineer best-in-class harnesses, and how to create best practices for agentic engineering that engineering teams adopt to 10x their productivity—without sacrificing quality. Your mindset will be that of a builder and an architect, someone who solves problems in the system itself. No problem will be too large or too small for you to solve yourself. You will set the technical direction and hold the cadenced meetings that turns technical strategy into working, production-ready outcomes. You will be in the design reviews and in the code, not adjacent to them. You will move fast, and you will ensure our engineering team is never the reason an initiative slows down.

You are the technical owner of all Toptal’s products. You will collaborate closely with Product to design infrastructure that exposes Toptal’s core business logic through modular interfaces the rest of the business can build on. Alongside a group of hands-on executives, your engineering discipline directly shapes Toptal’s growth, profitability, and operational excellence.

You will own resourcing and workforce planning as a doer: scoping the work, sizing the teams, planning headcount against it, defining the role and the bar for every seat. None of that is beneath the role, and we are not interested in someone who thinks these tasks can be done properly by handing it off to HR. Hiring is the highest-leverage work you do, and we want someone who is visibly excited about hiring A-players—with a sense of urgency.

Then, you lead the team. You will set the standards, develop people against those standards, and know exactly who is meeting those standards.

You will be one of Toptal’s foremost experts on AI, and you will stay ahead of a field that never stops moving. You will coach engineers on agentic best practices, show the executive team what is newly possible with the new AI tooling, and push AI into every function at Toptal.

This role runs on high-energy execution and attention to detail. You will bring urgency to every part of it and measure yourself on outcomes. We are not looking for someone to oversee this work. We are looking for someone to drive it and get into the detiwls.

This is a remote position. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities:

The following information is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or required skills.

One precondition runs through all of it: you conceive the strategy. You will form your own view of where engineering and AI should go, build the case, and bring the CEO a strategy to react to, not a request for direction.

AI and agentic engineering

• Own Toptal’s AI technology strategy and the architecture beneath it: model selection and fine-tuning, harness design, orchestration, retrieval, context engineering, tool and MCP integration, guardrails, evaluation, and cost control, exposed as primitives every team composes against.
• Deploy agentic engineering at scale against the work that runs this business: matching, vetting, onboarding, delivery, and internal operations. Own the outcomes those agents are accountable for.
• Make AI quality measurable. Own the evals, the regression suites, and the review loops, so quality here is proven rather than claimed.
• Rebuild how the platform gets built and operated, raising output per engineer through AI-assisted development, review, testing, and operations. Engineers have to want this, not comply with it, and creating that pull is on you.

Team, resourcing, and accountability

• Decide what a team should look like now that the roles have blurred, where the product manager believes they can design and code, the engineer believes they can do product and design, and the designer believes they can code and do product.
• Own resourcing and workforce planning: scope the roadmap into buildable work, plan headcount and sequence, write the specs, and hit time-sensitive hiring commitments.
• Own the bar for the team: assess talent honestly, develop people against the bar, and hold it as the organization grows.

Platform and execution

• Own the architecture end to end, from services and data flows to interfaces and system boundaries, and hold the standards that keep it coherent as it grows.
• Own throughput, reliability, and the platform layer beneath them, including the AI-dependent paths where latency, drift, and provider outages are real failure modes. Own build-versus-buy, technical debt, secure-by-design architecture, responsible AI, and the engineering and AI cost structure down to inference and token spend.

In the first week, expect to:

• Learn Toptal’s model and platform architecture, and meet the leaders you will depend on across Engineering, Product, Industries, and Services.
• Establish a direct, working rhythm with the CEO.

In the first month, expect to:

• Assess the engineering function honestly, and assess AI maturity with it: what is really in production, what is measured, what is duplicated, and what should be shut down.
• Assess the team against the bar this role requires, and bring the executive team a strategy no one asked you for.

In the first three months, expect to:

• Be executing your own plan, with a review cadence and clear accountability at every level, and your resourcing plan presented.
• Stand up the shared AI architecture and evals, and put one agentic workflow into production with a baseline and a measured result.

In the first six months, expect to:

• Show business impact from agents in production in at least two core workflows, with the evidence behind it.
• Have the leadership team you need, with the bar visibly raised, and throughput and reliability moving on the paths that matter most.

In the first year, expect to:

• Run an engineering organization recognized inside and outside Toptal as one of the most advanced in the industry, with the pull on AI now coming from engineering.
• Have AI leverage embedded in the architecture and the operating model, not living in a portfolio of pilots, and the team you built delivering against plan.

Qualifications and Job Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field is required, and an advanced degree is strongly preferred.
• 15+ years of progressive engineering leadership, including significant time as a CTO or VP of Engineering, or as a direct report to one at meaningful scale.
• Deep, current, hands-on command of modern AI engineering: foundation models, agentic architectures, harness design, retrieval, context engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation. You have shipped and operated these in production, and you know how to build and fine-tune foundation models from the ground up.
• Agentic systems deployed at scale against real business processes, with measured outcomes on cost, cycle time, quality, or revenue, and a record of retiring what did not work.
• Rigor about evaluation. You can explain precisely how you knew a model, prompt, or agent change was an improvement, and you can show the evidence.
• Command of the economics underneath it: model routing, hosted versus self-hosted, inference capacity, latency and cost budgets, and staying portable across providers.
• Further ahead on AI than the executives around you, able to teach it, and proven at moving an organization to adopt something it was not asking for.
• You create strategy rather than administer it, and you win arguments on evidence rather than authority, including your view on what a team should look like in the age of AI.
• Proven ownership of resourcing and workforce planning, and a hiring track record you can quantify. You have made the hard calls when someone was not clearing the bar.
• Currently hands-on. You read and write code, you can take apart a design document or an eval harness and find the flaw in it, and you command distributed systems, service architecture, data-intensive applications, and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Experience scaling and modernizing a large existing codebase without stopping the business. You have replaced load-bearing systems in flight, not only built greenfield.
• Experience leading a globally distributed, remote team at a technology or hyper-growth company is required. A high-volume, two-sided marketplace or multi-tenant platform is a significant plus.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.
• Speed, ownership, and quality. You move with urgency, decide without perfect information, and treat everything you deliver as a reflection of yourself.
• You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.

US FLSA Classification: Full-Time/Exempt