From the listing
About the role
Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce.
As Chief Technology Officer, you will drive execution for the product and engineering teams and put AI at the core of everything the company builds. You will own Toptal’s full technical architecture and build it AI-first, utilizing best practices for agentic engineering to 10x productivity without sacrificing quality.
You will collaborate closely with Product to design infrastructure that exposes core business logic through modular interfaces. Alongside a group of hands-on executives, your engineering discipline directly shapes Toptal’s growth, profitability, and operational excellence.
What you'll do
- Conceive the engineering and AI strategy and bring a proactive plan to the CEO.
- Own the AI technology strategy including model selection, fine-tuning, harness design, orchestration, retrieval, and cost control.
- Deploy agentic engineering at scale against core business processes like matching, vetting, onboarding, and delivery.
- Make AI quality measurable by owning evals, regression suites, and review loops.
- Raise output per engineer through AI-assisted development, review, testing, and operations.
- Own resourcing and workforce planning: scope the roadmap, plan headcount, write specs, and hit hiring commitments.
- Maintain the end-to-end architecture, including throughput, reliability, and the platform layer.
- Manage the engineering and AI cost structure, including inference and token spend.
- Assess talent honestly, develop people against the bar, and hold standards as the organization grows.
What they're looking for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 15+ years of progressive engineering leadership, including time as a CTO, VP of Engineering, or direct report to one at scale.
- Deep, current, hands-on command of modern AI engineering: foundation models, agentic architectures, and fine-tuning.
- Proven experience shipping and operating agentic systems at scale with measured business outcomes.
- Ability to build and fine-tune foundation models from the ground up.
- Current hands-on coding ability and command of distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
- Experience leading a globally distributed, remote team at a technology or hyper-growth company.
- Experience scaling and modernizing a large existing codebase and replacing load-bearing systems in flight.
- Command of AI economics: model routing, inference capacity, and latency/cost budgets.
Nice to have
- Advanced degree in a technical field.
- Experience with high-volume, two-sided marketplaces or multi-tenant platforms.
From the company page
Toptal benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Work wherever, on your terms. Being a fully-remote workforce means that all you need is wifi and a laptop. You can work from home, your favorite cafe, or even a charming villa halfway around the world.”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Toptal
Toptal has one of my favorite (and clear) remote work policies:
Work Remotely
Work wherever, on your terms. Being a fully-remote workforce means that all you need is wifi and a laptop. You can work from home, your favorite cafe, or even a charming villa halfway around the world.
I would love to see a little more information about the perks and benefits Toptal offers its employees.
Note: They do NOT appear to be a Hire From Anywhere (HFA) company. You likely need to be eligible to apply for certain positions.