Founding CTO (Full-Time) — Nclusive Scan
About Nclusive Scan
Nclusive Scan is building an AI accessibility platform that converts content into inclusive, multi-format outputs—ASL via an avatar, simplified text, closed captions, and audio—so organizations can communicate more effectively with people who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or low vision, neurodivergent, and more. Cone Health is one of the first customers and investors in their product.
We’re early-stage and moving fast. This is a hands-on, founding leadership role responsible for turning our technical plan into a production-grade platform.
The Opportunity
As Founding CTO, you’ll own the end-to-end technical vision and execution: from model strategy and data pipelines to real-time inference, rendering, packaging, and delivery. You’ll build the initial team, establish engineering standards, and partner with the CEO/founders on fundraising readiness and enterprise customer traction.
This role is ideal for someone who loves building at the intersection of:
- LLMs and multimodal pipelines
- Speech + video generation
- 3D/avatar rendering
- Enterprise-grade security and reliability
What You’ll Build (Core System)
You’ll lead development across the platform described in our block diagrams, including:
1) Input processing
- Text ingestion and normalization (“clean text”)
- Speech/audio ingestion with ASR where needed
2) Text simplification & language layer
- LLM-based transformation into simplified text and structured intermediate representations
- Versioning and evaluation workflows for iterative quality improvement
3) Multimodal generation
- Audio generation (TTS + word timestamps)
- ASL avatar generation using a text-to-gesture model + facial animation and rendering pipeline
4) Synchronization & packaging
- Closed captions generation (SRT/VTT)
- Final muxing/packaging into an accessible video output (MP4), plus API delivery
5) ASL model training & creation
- Data collection and preparation (video + facial expression + hand/body pose)
- ASL gloss annotation, cleaning, augmentation, quality gates
- Model selection, training, validation, evaluation on unseen data
- Export + integration into the avatar system + deployment
Responsibilities
Own architecture and execution end-to-end (prototype → MVP → enterprise-ready).
- Build and scale our NVIDIA-based AI stack, including (as applicable)
- NVIDIA NeMo (LLM/NLP workflows, fine-tuning, evaluation)
- NVIDIA Riva (ASR/TTS, timestamps, streaming considerations)
- NVIDIA Omniverse (avatar/scene pipeline and rendering workflow)
- NVIDIA Audio2Face (facial animation / lip-sync)
- GPU inference optimization and deployment best practices (performance, latency, cost)
- Design the platform as a secure, multi-tenant system:
- AuthN/AuthZ, auditing/logging, data governance, and privacy-by-default practices
- Observability (metrics, traces), reliability targets, and incident response patterns
- Establish the engineering operating system:
- CI/CD, testing strategy, release process, model evaluation gates, documentation
- Make key build-vs-buy decisions and manage critical vendors/partners.
- Recruit and lead the early engineering team (employees + contractors), with a plan to scale post-seed.
- Support go-to-market and fundraising:
- Join customer calls, translate needs into roadmap, and produce clear technical narratives for investors and diligence
Must-Have Qualifications
- Proven experience shipping production software as a technical lead (startup and/or enterprise), ideally in a “0→1” environment.
- Strong platform engineering fundamentals: APIs, pipelines/queues, data storage, security, observability, and cloud infrastructure.
- Hands-on experience deploying AI systems in production (evaluation, guardrails, cost/latency tradeoffs).
- Meaningful experience with NVIDIA’s AI stack (at least two of the following, with preference for more):
- NeMo, Riva, Omniverse, Audio2Face
- GPU inference optimization, model serving, and deployment practices
- Comfort operating in ambiguity with high ownership and speed.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with avatar/3D pipelines, animation blending, video rendering, or real-time media systems.
- Accessibility domain experience (captions, ASL/linguistics, assistive technology, WCAG-adjacent workflows).
- Experience navigating enterprise security reviews and compliance requirements.
What Success Looks Like
First 30–60 days
- Confirm reference architecture and ship a stable MVP slice end-to-end (text → simplified text → audio/timestamps → ASL avatar video → captions → packaged output)
- Stand up evaluation baselines and quality gates
First 90–180 days
- Improve quality, reliability, and performance to support enterprise pilots
- Formalize data/model iteration loop for ASL model training, validation, and deployment
- Hire/assemble the core engineering team for the seed roadmap
Compensation & Equity
This is a full-time founding role. We are currently pre-seed / pre-financing, and we want to be explicit about the structure:
Before the seed round closes
- Cash compensation: may be deferred until seed financing closes (or a minimal stipend, depending on runway)
- Equity: meaningful founding-level equity, commensurate with a CTO role at this stage
- Any deferral will be documented in a written agreement that clearly outlines how deferred amounts are handled upon financing (e.g., starting salary upon close and a defined approach to any deferred comp)
After the seed round closes (target range)
- Base salary: $180,000–$240,000 (final depends on experience, scope, and location)
- Equity: ongoing CTO-level equity with standard vesting; refresh/retention considered as we scale
- Benefits: standard startup benefits package (health, PTO, etc.) instituted post-raise
Location / Work Style
- Flexible (remote/hybrid). High ownership, high velocity, low ego. We care about measurable outcomes and strong engineering fundamentals.
