Forward Deployed CTO

About Tribe AI

Tribe embeds senior AI engineers and technical leaders directly into enterprise clients to drive AI transformation that actually ships. We're not a traditional consulting firm — we're operators who build alongside clients, own outcomes, and leave behind systems and capabilities that endure.

About the Role

The Forward Deployed CTO is a field executive who owns the technical transformation of a focused portfolio of enterprise clients — and uses that work to build something lasting for Tribe.

This isn't a delivery management role. You're not running status meetings or coordinating handoffs. You're the person a Fortune 500 CTO calls when they need to make a consequential decision about AI, and you're also the person building the methodology that makes Tribe's delivery consistently excellent across every account.

You'll own 1–2 high-stakes client engagements deeply — setting technical direction, leading cross-functional teams, and holding the bar on what ships. In parallel, you'll translate what you learn in the field into reusable Tribe IP: architecture patterns, evaluation frameworks, deployment playbooks. That internal work is as central to the role as the client work.

This is the role for a technical founder-operator who wants to drive transformation at scale without taking all the startup risk.

Key Responsibilities

Client Transformation

• Own technical delivery across a focused portfolio of 1–2 enterprise accounts — setting direction, managing risk, and holding the standard on outcomes.

• Act as the senior technical partner for C-suite stakeholders: translate business problems into architectural decisions and make those decisions defensible.

• Guide clients through the hardest AI transformation decisions — when to automate, when to augment, how to govern, and how to scale what's working.

• Be the person clients call when something is critical or when they need a strategic perspective, not just a project update.

Practice Building

• Build reusable Tribe IP from your client work: architecture patterns, evaluation frameworks, deployment playbooks, and tooling that raises the floor for every FDE team.

• Develop Tribe's point of view in your domain — whether that's healthcare, financial services, supply chain, or another vertical you know deeply.

• Spot what's generalizable before anyone else does. The best FD-CTOs don't just solve one client's problem — they solve it in a way that makes the next engagement faster and sharper.

Team Leadership

• Hire, develop, and retain FD Engineers, Architects, and PMs across your accounts.

• Create conditions for your teams to do their best work — clear scope, the right tools, and air cover to move fast.

• Run 1:1s and performance conversations that actually accelerate people's growth, not just check the box.

About You

• 12+ years of engineering experience with deep expertise in AI/ML and production systems.

• You've founded a company or built a 0-to-1 product as a technical lead. You know what it means to own an outcome, not just a workstream.

• Strong command of the modern AI stack: LLMs, agentic frameworks, RAG, vector infrastructure, cloud deployment, and evaluation pipelines.

• Background in client-facing or consulting engineering where delivery accountability was real — not advisory.

• Executive presence: you can hold a room with a Fortune 500 CTO and earn trust in the first conversation.

• You think in systems and patterns. You see what's reusable across client problems before anyone else does.

• Comfortable managing ambiguity across high-stakes accounts without losing track of what matters.

Why This, Why Now

The bottleneck in enterprise AI is no longer model capability — it's deployment. Getting from a working prototype to a system that materially changes a company's revenue or cost line is hard, and most firms can't do it consistently. Tribe can, and the FD-CTO is the person who proves it at the highest level.

The FDE function is the fastest-growing role in tech — FDE job postings grew 729% year-over-year in 2026. OpenAI formalized its deployment function at scale. The category is being defined in real time, and Tribe is building the best forward-deployed team in AI.

What you build here — the methodology, the frameworks, the client relationships, the team — is a body of work you'll point to for the rest of your career.