Are you ready to make a dent in the universe?

If that question lands, not as a cliché, but as a genuine orientation toward your career, keep reading.

Our client is a technology company operating at the convergence of advanced science and the physical world. They are solving an environmental problem that matters: one that, left unaddressed, will compound for decades. The science has been validated. The first products are in the market. The company is well-funded and growing. What comes next is the harder, more interesting challenge: building the engineering systems, manufacturing discipline, and organizational capability to take what works in controlled settings and make it work everywhere; repeatedly, reliably, and at scale.

This is a role for a CTO who understands that deep tech is not just a category. It is a commitment to doing things that cannot be easily copied, that require genuine mastery across hardware, software, chemistry, and process engineering. The right candidate is comfortable where disciplines collide: where electrochemistry meets embedded firmware, where biological processes meet precision manufacturing, where industrial control systems meet machine learning, where scale-up engineering meets commercial urgency.

The Opportunity

The Chief Technology Officer is the person who makes science real and repeatable. Reporting directly to the CEO, this leader owns the translation of proven scientific capability into deployable, manufacturable, commercially viable systems. They design the operating model, decision frameworks, risk governance, and engineering culture that move the company from a validated prototype to a distributed platform.

This is not a role for someone who manages a roadmap someone else built. It is for someone who thrives in the space between what has been scientifically proven and what industry has yet to build. The work is first-of-kind. The problems do not have established answers. And the standard for success is not whether the system works in the lab, it is whether it performs in the field, for a real customer, under real-world conditions, every time.

Key dimensions of the mandate include:

• Owning the end-to-end product development lifecycle: from R&D handoff through NPI, design for manufacturability, field validation, and commercial deployment.
• Building and integrating the technical organization, engineering, product, data, and operations into a cohesive function where people understand how their work connects to the whole.
• Commercializing the AI and predictive models that differentiate the company's core workflow, evolving them from research prototypes into production-grade industrial systems.
• Developing the deployment model for commercial-scale designing systems that can replicate consistently across facilities and geographies without rebuilding from scratch.
• Serving as the company's primary technical voice with the board, investors, and strategic partners, translating complex technical realities into narratives that build confidence.
• Establishing the technical governance, go/no-go checkpoints, and risk management frameworks that keep the organization honest with itself as complexity grows.
• Building a culture of lateral-thinking engineers who stay curious about what comes next, care about how their work gets picked up downstream, and are accountable to each other and to the mission.

What You Bring

The right person for this role has likely spent their career at the intersection of science and engineering, drawn to problems that do not have established answers and organizations that are building capability for the first time. You are not a pure software architect, and you are not a pure lab scientist. You are the person who bridges them, who understands both deeply enough to design the systems where they meet, and who has the judgment to know when the science requires a different engineering answer than the one that would be convenient.

Specifically, you bring:

• A track record of taking complex technical or scientific systems from validated prototype through full commercial deployment, not just delivering the science, but making it manufacturable, reliable, and scalable.
• Deep experience with NPI discipline: DFM, QA systems, supply chain architecture, shelf-life or operational constraints, and the product readiness process that bridges R&D and commercial scale.
• Comfort with hardware-software integration in process-intensive environments, industrial controls, automation, embedded systems, data pipelines, and the operational stack that makes a physical product actually work in the field.
• Background in chemical systems, biochemistry, analytical instrumentation, advanced materials, or process engineering. No single discipline is required, but candidates whose experience is entirely removed from physical, process-intensive systems will find this role a significant stretch.
• Experience building and scaling technical organizations: growing small founding teams into multi-layered functions, developing the next generation of engineering leaders, and creating the role clarity that lets talented people do their best work without waiting for direction.
• The kind of judgment that comes from having made consequential decisions under ambiguity and from having learned from the ones that did not go as planned.
• Comfort representing technical strategy at the board and investor level, with the ability to translate complex technical realities into narratives that build confidence and move things forward.

Who You Are

Technical credentials will get you into the conversation. What will get you the role is something harder to put on a resume.

You are a culture designer who understands that the ultimate measure of your leadership is an organization that gets collectively smarter over time. You make it safe to collaborate toward the right answer rather than compete to be the one who has it. You model intellectual humility openly and create conditions where every perspective is valued, and every question advances the room because the most expensive question is the one that goes unasked.

You are an accountability partner who sets the bar high and means it. Engineers are wired to be challenged. The stretch goal is an invitation, the follow-up is coaching, and the leader who asks for more and then shows up every day to support it creates the conditions for the most rewarding professional experience their team will ever have.

You are a cross-domain learner who stays in constant conversation across disciplines, industries, and fields of experience, because the insight that unlocks a first-of-kind problem is just as likely to come from an unexpected source as from inside the domain.

And you genuinely believe that building something that changes how the world handles one of its most urgent environmental challenges is worth the difficulty of the work required to make it happen.