CTO (KidTech)

CTO, KidTech

Location: Europe, LATAM

Salary: Equity

Technical partner of the product co-founder. Own the product end to end from the technical side — apps, how they meet the hardware, the stack, the releases and the engineering team.

Position summary

You are the technical partner of the product co-founder, at the same level. You own the product end to end from the technical side: the apps, how they meet the hardware, the stack, the releases, and the engineering team. Hardware and logistics sit on a separate line. This is a hands-on role: at the start you write a large share of the app and backend code yourself, and as founding and LLM engineers join, you move toward validating their decisions while staying close to the code.

The core of the role is mobile apps, in a children's or educational product, ideally from a company people recognise. Speech to text, text to speech and voice commands you need at the level of judgment, not as the job itself. You are the senior person in the room: you look at the system from above, choose a direction, and run the function.

Key responsibilities

• Parent app and backend: Take the parent app from the hardware line and become its owner. Make the app work for a parent: pair the device, create an account, set controls, see what the child did, delete the data. Ship iOS and Android with a real release process. Keep the backend behind those flows working.
• Technical decisions: Choose the stack and defend the choice. Validate what the founding and LLM engineers propose, and own the result. Decide what runs on the device and what runs in the cloud.
• Software on the device: Own the seam with the hardware line: technical requirements, not manufacturing gates. Hold the quality bar for a four-year-old. Judge speech to text, text to speech and built-in voice commands at the level of architecture.
• LLM function: Manage the LLM engineer and define what good looks like. Own unit economics as a result.
• Agents: Own the product agent layer: dialogue, characters, orchestration, evals, and safety agents. Own how the engineering team works with agents.
• Privacy and child safety: Own the technical side of children's privacy: what is stored, retention, encryption, deletion. Hold the right to block a release on child-safety grounds.
• Engineering team: Design the software team, run technical interviews and set the hiring bar. Build the engineering practice: review, ADR, post-mortems, release cadence.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years as a full-stack engineer with an apps focus: iOS and Android in production is required.
• Experience in children's or educational products.
• 3+ years of technical leadership: architectural ownership, engineering standards, review culture.
• Vibe-coding and agents as a regular working mode for the team.
• Product judgment: you narrow scope, choose cuts, explain trade-offs to stakeholders.
• Confirmed production in mobile and the backend behind it.
• Demonstrated speed.
• Evidence of shipped apps is required.
• Children's data in software: what is stored, encryption, retention.
• English B2: code, documentation, calls, vendors, child-development experts.

Employment terms

• Format: Full-time, remote, B2B contract; overlap into CET for the team; travel to the contract manufacturer around production milestones.
• Equity: Equity in the product.