CTO - AI Assisted Food & Bev Development (Zucca)
Location: Seattle, WA
Backed by Pioneer Square Labs:
Pioneer Square Labs (PSL) is a premier startup studio and early-stage venture capital fund focused on fostering the next generation of technology companies. PSL Studio collaborates with exceptional entrepreneurs to develop ideas from scratch, validate them, and build venture-scale companies. The CTO will work directly with the PSL engineering team during the onboarding and ramp up period. Over the past eight years, PSL has successfully spun out over 35 businesses. We are continuously seeking extraordinary individuals to build with us.
Zucca:
At Zucca, we are revolutionizing the Food & Beverage (F&B) CPG product development process by helping brands commercialize faster and smarter. Zucca is a generative AI platform designed specifically for F&B brands and manufacturers. Zucca’s technology helps scope, develop, and launch new products effortlessly, with AI that accelerates ideation, reduces scoping time by 90% and proactively keeps projects on track with fewer surprises.
- Ideate new concepts in under an hour
- Scope new projects 10x faster
- Keep costs in check with continuous estimates
- Accelerate product development, avoiding pitfalls and delays
- Integrate existing documents & briefs to keep projects on scope and flag surprises
Responsibilities:
- Serve as a thought leader and strategy driver for the company in tandem with the CEO
- Work with customers, business, development, design, and fulfillment teams to understand and influence product vision and requirements
- Develop and own all technical aspects of Zucca’s strategy
- Translate our strategy into an achievable roadmap and action plan
- Help assess the specific skills and qualities needed for a world-class engineering team and the task at hand
- Lead by example by being hands-on and actively involved in the development process, including the ability and willingness to write and review production-level code as needed
- Budget for, hire and manage a team of developers
- Act as a champion for our inclusive values and as a source of mentorship and growth
- Provide management and execution against project plans and delivery commitments
- Cultivate a sense of customer empathy to continue building an exceptional product
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related technical discipline
- 5+ years of relevant software engineering experience (including LLM prompting, production SAAS products, distributed cloud services, and exposure to machine learning).
- Experience in the following is a plus:
- AI prompt engineering
- Generative AI product development experience
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- Familiarity with the current AI foundation model landscape
- 5+ years of team management experience
- Problem-solving aptitude
- Ability and experience scaling a company
