[Hiring] CTO @Food Impact Partners

Role Description

The poultry industry has always struggled to get high-quality commercial data, and nothing is harder to measure than welfare. Most of what we think we know about welfare technology rests on small university studies that don't look like commercial production and take years to run. The data that actually matters has simply been too hard to capture at scale. But that’s changing: new AI tools around continuous sensing, machine vision, and robotics are giving us the ability to measure welfare at the level of the individual bird, and to run rigorous experiments against those measurements. Your job is to build a new, AI-native technology stack for observing and understanding animal welfare under real production conditions. This is a full-time exempt remote position, requiring travel within the United States.

Responsibilities

• Own the technology strategy: the AI-native monitoring and data infrastructure (cameras, sensors, bird-level tracking, environmental telemetry) that is the backbone for every trial we run.
• Make build/buy/partner decisions across the tech stack — including for hardware that can survive real barn conditions — and integrate components into one coherent, reusable system rather than a pile of point solutions.
• Work with the Program Team to build the pipeline of external technologies we test (robotics, computer vision, vaccines, feed additives, etc.) — assess readiness, design the integration, and render clear go/no-go judgments.
• Build the data platform and standards so results are clean, comparable, and reusable across trials.
• Build the technical team. Make the first engineering and data hires, decide what we hold in-house versus contract or partner for, and convene the outside expertise we don't have.
• Understand and interface with the systems already in a working barn (control units, feed lines, ventilation) and lead the technical side of infrastructure upgrades.
• Own our IP strategy on the technology side: identify genuinely novel inventions and file patents opportunistically, and manage licensing and ownership terms with technology partners.

Qualifications

• A technical generalist with broad working knowledge across AI/ML, computer vision, sensing, data infrastructure, and hardware.
• Ability to use AI to put structure on messy things.
• A 0-to-1 builder with experience developing a technical roadmap and building a working system from nothing.
• AI-native, designing from the assumption that AI and data are the foundation, not an add-on.
• Physical-world experience is a plus, ideally having built systems commercially deployed in physical, uncontrolled environments like farms, factories, or field hardware.
• A team builder with experience hiring and leading small technical teams.
• A fast learner of new domains, with a willingness to get up to speed on broiler production and welfare quickly.
• Mission-aligned, caring about animal welfare and wanting to improve it.
• A translator, able to communicate with diverse stakeholders including barn managers, machine-learning engineers, startup founders, and philanthropic funders.