Co-Founder / CTO (Equity Only-No Base Pay)

Company DescriptionSureNode is building trust infrastructure for AI agents: secure, verifiable, and transparent interactions between intelligent systems and the people who rely on them. We are working with a select group of design partners to refine the core platform and validate real-world use cases. This is an early-stage environment where incoming team members have real influence over technical direction, architecture, and product strategy. As part of a small, focused team, you will work directly with founders, partners, and customers to shape how trustworthy AI systems get built and deployed.Role DescriptionAs Co-Founder / CTO, you will own the technical strategy, architecture, and execution for SureNode's platform. This is a full-time, remote role. You will design and build the core systems for AI agent security, identity, and reliability, and you will own the technical roadmap and the architecture decisions that come with it.This is a deeply hands-on technical role, not a manage-from-the-sidelines one. Day to day, you will write and review production code, run architecture reviews, choose and integrate the foundational stack, and set the engineering practices every future hire inherits. You will design systems that scale, and you will be the person who makes the hard calls when they need to. You will work closely with the founding team and design partners to turn customer needs into product, ship fast, and iterate on real feedback. As a co-founder, you will also represent the technical vision in investor, partner, and customer conversations.This is a co-founder role with founding-level equity. There is no base salary until we raise. It is for someone who wants ownership and upside over a paycheck, and who believes in the problem enough to bet on it with us.QualificationsExtensive hands-on engineering experience building distributed systems, security, or infrastructure products. You are still close to the code and ship core systems yourself.A background in identity and access management is required. You have built or operated IAM systems and understand the hard parts firsthand: authentication, authorization, access control, token and credential handling, and the failure modes that come with getting any of it wrong.Proven experience designing and scaling production systems. You know how systems behave under load and how to architect for growth without over-building for it.A track record of owning architecture and technical direction at an early-stage or high-growth company. You can run a rigorous architecture review: pressure-test a design, surface failure modes, weigh tradeoffs, and decide.Experience with AI, ML, or agent-based systems, especially around trust, safety, identity, or observability, is a strong plus.The mindset of a founder: comfortable with ambiguity, fast to act without waiting to be told, and able to recruit, mentor, and set the bar for an early engineering team.Strong communication skills for customer discovery, technical documentation, and aligning across investors, partners, and design partners.Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.