Roles · Founding team
Founding CTO
Latin America will spend this decade deciding whether it builds frontier AI capability or rents it. The region holds the energy, the minerals, the data, and the talent of 660 million people, and almost none of the compute, the models, or the governance leverage. If nothing changes, the most important technology of the century arrives as an import, priced and governed elsewhere. Futuros exists to change that.
Futuros is the evidence platform for that argument: a live, cited, trilingual observatory of 25 countries built to put verifiable numbers in front of heads of state, CELAC, the IDB, CAF, ECLAC, and the private sector. The thesis is a flywheel. Consent-based data infrastructure feeds a sovereign regional model; the model strengthens democratic governance and frontier intelligence; that value attracts more data. Every claim on the platform resolves to a source.
The platform is in production today.
Platform in early access for partners and funders. We will walk you through it live during the process.
The role
The founding CTO owns the hard technical core of Futuros: the AI infrastructure and the data architecture. That means the retrieval and inference stack, the evidence pipeline, the provenance model, and the production platform they run on. It is a building role. You ship, and you decide what gets shipped.
What you'll do
- Design the data architecture. Ingestion from hundreds of statistical, institutional, and news sources; schema and registry design; freshness guarantees; quality gates that catch silent upstream failures before they reach a minister's screen.
- Own provenance end to end. Every figure on the platform resolves to its source record. Keep that guarantee true while the corpus grows from hundreds of sources to thousands.
- Build the retrieval and grounding stack. Hybrid lexical and semantic indexing, reranking, grounding verification, and the evaluation harnesses that measure whether an answer is faithful to its evidence.
- Design the sovereign-inference path. Model selection and fine-tuning, serving infrastructure, evaluation, and the unit economics of running regional models on regional terms.
- Direct the AI-agent workforce that maintains and extends the platform: orchestration, evals, observability, and the judgment calls on what stays autonomous and what needs human ownership.
- Harden the platform to government grade. Security, reliability, privacy engineering, and the audit trails that ministries and multilaterals require.
- Build the data-trust infrastructure. Consent, licensing, contribution ledgers, and revocation, so data can be computed on without being possessed.
- Hire the founding technical team and act as the technical counterpart to governments and multilaterals: architecture reviews, procurement, pilots in the field.
What we're looking for
- AI-native. Agents, models, and evals are how you build, not a feature you bolt on. You have shipped LLM systems to production and can reason about their costs and failure modes.
- Data platform depth. Heterogeneous ingestion at scale, provenance, quality, freshness. You treat citation integrity as an engineering property.
- Staff-plus range. You ship end to end alone when needed: schema to pipeline to API to interface to deploy.
- Our languages, or close. Deep TypeScript and strong Python; SQL you can hand-tune. And you have worked below the provider-API line: PyTorch or a comparable fine-tuning toolchain, embeddings and vector search, and a serving stack such as vLLM.
- Professional working Spanish. Our counterparts are governments and multilaterals that operate in Spanish.
- Founding temperament. You are comfortable owning ambiguous problems with no one above you to escalate to.
Nice to have
- Roots or deep working ties in Latin America. Strongly preferred.
- Our wider toolkit: React, Vite, bun, TanStack, Tailwind, serverless and edge runtimes on Vercel, DuckDB, Redis, GitHub Actions.
- Rust or Go for performance-critical services.
- Sovereign or confidential-compute experience; security and compliance work for the public sector.
- Portuguese.
- An open-source track record.
- Working statistics: indices, uncertainty, and why a composite can lie.
How this works
This is a founding conversation. We are open on compensation, equity, and scope for the right fit, and we come to the table with strong institutional backing. We will be transparent about terms from the first call and expect the same directness back.
How to apply
Send a short note on your interest in the role, an example of what you've built that's aligned with the role, and why this is the dream role for you.
marcus@ladp.io