About the role

You will lead the technology behind our assessments of metacognition in people, AI systems and their interaction. You will own software delivery, architecture, infrastructure, security and engineering quality across the platform. That platform includes the applications people use to complete assessments, the systems that run experiments with human participants and AI models, the data infrastructure behind them, and the reporting tools clients use to explore results.

You will report to our CEO and work closely with our Head of Research. The Head of Research is accountable for scientific validity, and you will be accountable for technical readiness. Together, you will set the shared engineering standards that let research methods move reliably into production, without slowing the experiments that drive the science.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will personally write and review code, build core systems and develop the platform alongside software engineers. Initially, expect to spend at least half of your time building, with the balance shifting towards leadership as the team and platform grow.

What you’ll do

Depending on the stage of the platform and the company’s priorities, your work will include:

• Set engineering priorities with the CEO and Head of Research, translating research and client needs into scoped projects, delivery plans and clear acceptance criteria.

• Own the technical architecture across our assessment applications, experiment orchestration, model-provider integrations, data infrastructure and reporting tools, and decide what to keep, rebuild, buy or replace.

• Write production code yourself, and set the technical bar through code review, design review and clear engineering practices.

• Design data models and pipelines that accurately capture responses, response times, confidence judgements, model outputs and experiment metadata, keeping every result traceable to the task version, model configuration and scoring method that produced it.

• Build experiment orchestration that recovers from interrupted runs without losing or duplicating data, with concurrency, retries and caching that preserve the intended experimental design.

• Work with the Head of Research and research engineers to agree how tasks, scoring methods and models are specified, versioned, tested and integrated, preserving their intended behaviour and experimental requirements.

• Own the platform’s technical security and data-protection controls, including authentication, access controls, separation of client data, audit logging, pseudonymisation and retention, working with the COO and specialist advisers on data-handling and residency requirements.

• Prepare the platform for enterprise clients in sectors such as law, finance and healthcare, leading technical due diligence and security reviews, and working towards standards such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 when client requirements make them necessary.

• Manage model-provider and cloud relationships, including costs, rate limits, changes in model availability and the data-handling terms that apply to client and participant information.

• Establish deployment, testing, monitoring, backup, recovery and incident-response practices proportionate to a small team.

• Hire, lead and mentor software engineers, and build an engineering culture with high standards and clear ownership.

• Act as the company’s technical voice with clients, partners and investors, explaining technical choices, risks and trade-offs clearly.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have substantial experience building and operating production software, including leading the technical direction of a product or platform at an early-stage company or similar environment.

• Still enjoy writing code and want to remain hands-on, with strong skills in Python, TypeScript or a comparable language.

• Have designed systems end to end, from data model to deployment, and lived with the consequences of those decisions.

• Understand how applications, APIs, databases and cloud infrastructure work together, and can diagnose problems across those boundaries.

• Have a strong instinct for security and data protection and understand what enterprise clients and their security teams will ask.

• Can work closely with researchers, understand why experimental details matter and translate those requirements into testable software behaviour.

• Have hired, led or mentored engineers, giving useful feedback early and helping people take increasing ownership of their work.

• Can judge when to prototype quickly and when to invest in reliability, maintainability and scale, and can explain those trade-offs to non-engineers.

• Use AI tools fluently in your own work, with the judgement to check what they produce and protect confidential information.

• Communicate clearly and work well with researchers and other colleagues whose requirements may evolve as they learn.

Your background might be in software engineering, computer science or a related field. We care most about what you have built and the teams you have helped grow; a particular degree or previous CTO title is not required.

Strong candidates may also have

We do not expect every candidate to have all of these strengths:

• Platform architecture. Experience designing APIs, relational data models and background processing, using databases such as PostgreSQL, and operating cloud infrastructure with containers, CI/CD and observability tools.

• Data integrity and reproducibility. Experience building systems where results must be versioned, traceable and reproducible, such as scientific, financial or analytics platforms.

• AI and research tooling. Experience integrating LLM APIs at scale, building evaluation or experiment orchestration tools, or supporting online behavioural studies with frameworks such as jsPsych and platforms such as Prolific.

• Assessment platforms. Experience implementing behavioural experiments or other measurement-sensitive applications, including randomisation, counterbalancing, response timing and participant session management.

• Security and compliance. Experience leading SOC 2 or ISO 27001 work, responding to enterprise security questionnaires, commissioning penetration tests or implementing UK GDPR controls for sensitive personal data.

• Early-stage leadership. Experience as a founding engineer, technical lead or CTO, taking a product from early prototype to dependable use and building the team around it.

• Client-facing technical work. Experience supporting enterprise sales, technical due diligence or integrations with clients in regulated sectors.

The opportunity

You will shape the technical foundations of Coalescent Cognition as part of our early leadership team. Working directly with the CEO and Head of Research, you will turn a working research platform into a product that organisations can trust with their people, their models and their data. Your decisions will determine how quickly we can run experiments, how reliably we deliver results and how confidently clients can work with us.

What we offer

• A competitive salary and meaningful equity through share options.

• Hybrid working from our office in Bloomsbury, central London, with 4 days a week together in person.

• 28 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, and a workplace pension.

• A learning budget and time for conferences.

• The chance to shape a new company and develop a new approach to measuring human and AI metacognition as part of the founding team.