WANT TO JOIN US?

We're looking for a builder at heart. Someone excited to shape the technology that brings our worlds to life, and just as excited to roll up their sleeves and build it.

You'll set the architecture for our AI orchestration layer, device stack, and safety infrastructure. Expect to live at the intersection of agentic AI, multimodal systems, and consumer IoT, with the seniority of a CTO and the instinct to stay in the codebase every day.

• San Francisco
• Full-Time
• Early Equity
• AI / ML
• Multimodal Systems
• IoT / Edge

The Company

Peace is creating the next frontier of entertainment and education - a real-world play platform that transforms physical spaces into magical, AI-driven story worlds. Our first device launches in 2026.

Our board includes the former Design Director of Apple, President of TripAdvisor, and Founding Director of Raspberry Pi. Our team has exited fast-growth tech companies, built AI at Google, and created the world's largest experiences with Stranger Things, Star Wars and Marvel.

We're co-founder funded at seven figures, with further seven-figure funding to expand. Investors include a Meta board member, a co-founder of Calm.com, and a co-founder of Twitch. You'll work directly with advisers at the top of Meta and OpenAI.

The Role

This is an early Head of Engineering position, but not the kind where you sit in strategy meetings while others write the code. You'll be the most senior technical voice in the company and one of its most productive engineers. You'll set the architecture, make the hard calls, and then get in the codebase and build it.

We have strong commercial and product leadership in place. What we need is someone who can match that on the technical side: an architect-engineer who thinks in systems, moves fast with modern AI tooling, and understands that at this stage, the best technical leader is the one who ships.

As the company scales, you'll hire and grow an engineering team around you. But right now, the job is to build — and we want someone who is genuinely energised by that.

The Technical Challenge

Three unsolved problems sit at the core of what we're building. You'll own all three — architecturally and in code.

1. Multimodal context fusion An always-on engine ingesting audio, motion, biometrics, GPS, and ambient sensor data: normalising heterogeneous inputs into a unified context layer in near real-time.
2. Sub-700ms AI latency Children's play demands fluid back-and-forth. You'll architect and build the inference pipeline that makes AI feel instantaneous, including on-device optimisation where needed.
3. Always-on connectivity The platform depends on continuous connectivity across consumer home networks and variable environments. Mesh, partial-local, and fallback strategies all in scope.

What You'll Own

• Set the technical vision and architecture for the platform - the AI orchestration layer, device stack, safety infrastructure, and the systems that connect them.
• Build core components of the real-world game engine yourself: the always-on AI system that receives multimodal inputs and drives immersive play experiences for children.
• Architect and implement the multimodal fusion layer - ingesting and normalising audio, motion, biometric, and location data into a unified context model.
• Attack the latency problem directly - optimising inference pipelines, experimenting with on-device processing, and finding the milliseconds that make AI feel instantaneous.
• Own the connectivity layer for consumer IoT environments - building resilience across real-world home and outdoor conditions.
• Establish AI safety as architecture: build the technical foundations that let us credibly tell parents their children are safe.
• Represent the technology to investors and partners - SF VCs will drill into architecture and safety, and you'll be the person who answers.
• Hire and grow the engineering team over time, building a culture and codebase that attracts strong engineers and lets them move quickly.

Who We're Looking For

• A builder first — you have the seniority to be CTO and the instinct to still be in the codebase every day at this stage of the company.
• Deep fluency with modern agentic AI and LLM-driven development: you move fast because you know how to wield these tools, not just talk about them.
• Strong hands-on experience with AI/ML systems in production - where latency, reliability, and safety actually mattered.
• Experience with multimodal systems: you've worked across more than one input type and understand the hard problems of fusing them at speed.
• Comfortable with IoT and edge constraints: devices, networks, latency, and the beautiful chaos of consumer hardware in real homes.
• The leadership credibility to represent the technology externally - to investors, partners, and future engineering hires.
• Genuine conviction about child safety in AI - you want to build the technical answer to the trust problem, not just comply with it.
• The self-awareness to know when to delegate and when to do it yourself - right now the answer is mostly the latter.

Nice to Have

• Experience with audio processing pipelines or speech / voice interfaces.
• Background in games, interactive media, or experience design platforms.
• Familiarity with mesh networking, BLE, or Wi-Fi reliability engineering in consumer contexts.
• Previous experience as a first or early engineer at a hardware-adjacent startup.

This Probably Isn't For You If…

• You're ready to step fully away from the codebase and into a purely strategic leadership role - that's the next chapter, not this one.
• You want a large team around you before you can move - you'll be building that team, not inheriting it.
• You're primarily interested in research or ML theory - the output here is a product that ships into children's homes in 2026.
• You're not comfortable being the technical voice to investors and partners as well as in the codebase.

What We Offer

Equity

Early CTO stake

Salary

Competitive for stage

Location

SF, with 2 days WFH flexibility

Stage

Pre-launch, device 2026

We're looking for the right person, not the right CV. If this problem space lights you up and you want your technical decisions to matter from day one - in the architecture and in the code - we'd love to hear from you.