CTO. Build the engine behind Echo.
Own the code and architecture of a brand-new AI research platform. Harden what our customers already use, and build the self-serve product they'll use next. Same codebase, same mission.
Who we are
User Echo is a brand-new company working at the edge of AI and customer research. We build digital twins of real customers, so teams can interview, test and explore their audiences in hours instead of months, with accuracy measured against real human interviews.
We're bootstrapped and early, with real traction: our first version is live, running real studies, and large companies are already knocking on the door. Today Echo runs as a managed service, with our researchers alongside the customer. Next, we're making it self-serve, and growing a lot.
The role
You'll be the first dedicated technical person on the team, and fully in charge of the code and the architecture. The roadmap is hybrid on purpose: every feature you ship for the managed service is a feature for the self-serve product too. Building the architecture for that self-serve future, with tiers and accounts, is as much part of the job as improving what runs today.
It's hands-on from day one. As we grow, you'll hire and lead the engineers who join after you.
Hard problems you'll work on
- Evaluating AI against reality. Measuring synthetic interviews against real human data is a hard, under-explored problem, and it's the heart of the product.
- Preserving human variance. Making a population of AI respondents behave like real people, with spread, personality and outliers, not one polished average.
- RAG over real customer research. Grounding every persona in a customer's own qualitative data, per sub-group, at scale.
- Taming stochastic pipelines. Turning non-deterministic LLM workflows into reliable, versioned, auditable studies.
- Proprietary data. Build our own research data foundation, from our own studies and public sources, never customer data, that makes every new audience sharper than any off-the-shelf model.
- Multi-model orchestration. Combine several AI models to make our twins more robust, more varied and less dependent on one provider.
- Shape the product from the ground up. Your decisions on architecture and self-serve set the course for everything that follows, with real customers already on board.
Your first 90 days
- Make long-running simulation and scoring jobs rock-solid under deploys and load
- Build versioned, auditable studies, so every result can be explained months later
- Productise the steps our researchers still do by hand: the biggest lever towards self-serve
- Raise throughput and lower the cost per study
- Put a proper test and CI safety net in place, so we can ship faster and safer
The stack
This is what our current MVP runs on: the version our customers are already excited about. Built fast, by a small team with heavy use of AI coding agents. None of it is sacred. Every choice below is yours to rethink, overhaul and solidify. That's part of the job.
What you'll do
- Own the Echo platform end to end: architecture, code, infrastructure and quality
- Harden and improve what's live today, and ship the features our customers ask for
- Design and build the self-serve SaaS: accounts, tiers, onboarding and everything in between
- Turn what our researchers still do by hand into product
- Join customer calls and sprint readouts, in sales and in delivery, to hear first-hand how Echo is used
- Work closely with the founder and founding team on the product roadmap
- Later: hire and lead the engineering team
Is this you?
You'll thrive if
- You've taken a B2B software product into production, ideally SaaS with multiple tiers
- You're strong in Python REST backends and PostgreSQL, ideally with vector search
- You've built with LLMs and RAG in practice, and know how to handle non-determinism
- You've designed long-running, resumable background jobs and shipped on cloud containers
- You think in architecture and still care about the UI
- You work customer-first and agile, and you've seen the problems a growing product runs into
- You build AI-first: coding agents are part of how you work every day
- You like ownership, ambiguity and seeing your work used within the week
You'll hate it if
- You want a fixed roadmap for the year ahead
- You need a full spec before you start
- You'd rather work inside a big engineering team
- You only want to do frontend, or only backend
Nice to have
- Affinity with research, strategic product development or value proposition design
- A background or interest in the social sciences
- Evaluating LLM or ML output against ground-truth data
- Embeddings, clustering and segmentation
- Moving a monolithic JavaScript front end to a component framework
- Taking a managed service to self-serve, multi-tenant SaaS
- Dutch. English is required
What we offer
- Full ownership of the technology behind a brand-new product
- A front-row seat with customers, from sales conversation to readout
- An AI-first way of working, with the tools to match
- A small founding team of experienced researchers and consultants who act as your sparring partners
- Flexibility: hybrid or remote, from our base near Antwerp
Competitive package, discussed with you. [Salary range, benefits and contract details to be added after benchmarking.]
Show us what you've built.
Send your CV, plus one thing you're proud of building: a product, a codebase, a deployed system or a technical write-up. Tell us what it is and why you're proud of it. That says more than any cover letter.