Vetted Chief Technology Officers

“Chief AI Strategy at startup Zenera with 30 years in technology strategy/design, experienced in building business plans across startups and large enterprises (projects, new products, and M&A). Deeply familiar with enterprise AI go-to-market challenges (slow procurement/pilot cycles) and preparing for VC expectations (e.g., targeting a16z) by emphasizing unique tech and paying customers.”

“Engineering leader/player-coach who built and validated a preference-based recommendation engine using clustering, including generating test data to evaluate how clusters evolve over time. Has SRE/DevOps experience and has owned production incidents end-to-end (logging-driven RCA and refactoring patterns that failed at large data scale). Emphasizes quality and platform stability via unit, integration, and load testing, and has managed performance via regular 1:1s and PIPs.”

Jesse Olson

Screened

Executive AI technology leader specializing in agentic AI and enterprise transformation

22y exp

“Candidate is exploring a startup in the autonomous agentic AI space and is approaching it with a disciplined founder mindset. They are evaluating market opportunity, competition, customer pain, ROI, technical feasibility, and MVP options while already speaking with potential customers across verticals to validate needs and buying processes.”

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“Senior engineering/technology leader with experience driving board-backed, multi-year platform transformations in retail commerce (American Eagle) and scaling ML/product delivery platforms at Amazon Alexa. Known for data-driven build-vs-buy decisions, org scaling (6→80), and measurable outcomes including 98.5%→99.9% uptime, 234 experiments generating ~$200M revenue lift, and increasing delivery velocity from 1.5 to 30 features/week while transitioning to DNN/large-model architectures.”

Jimmie Lee

Screened

Executive Technology & Strategic Operations Leader specializing in AI governance and cybersecurity

Greater Seattle Area, WA25y exp

“Serial entrepreneur who has launched 9+ bootstrapped businesses and has repeatedly raised capital as a CTO for other startups, leveraging a 7,000+ funder network and a sales-like fundraising pipeline approach. Deeply embedded in the VC/studio/accelerator ecosystem for 15+ years and currently mentors/advises with Stanford Venture Studios, Alchemist, and Ignyte in Dubai. Recently left Meta and is specifically targeting CTO roles for the next 5–10 years.”

SHIVA SANDY

Screened

Executive CTO/CIO specializing in FinTech, cloud transformation, and cybersecurity

Walnut Creek, CA27y exp

“Banking/credit-union technology executive (CTO/CTIO) who has led modernization and product delivery through major change, including a post-merger roadmap that helped grow a credit union from $600M to $1.5B in 3 years. Hands-on leader who drove cloud microservices/API architecture, introduced CI/CD, and accelerated releases from quarterly to weekly while scaling teams and operating effectively with distributed/remote orgs.”

“Co-founded Aethernet Inc., a B2B IoT connectivity platform with a usage-based revenue model and direct sales motion to device manufacturers. Bootstrapped with founder capital and strict cost control, with angel interest pending technical validation; developed the product through multi-year architecture experiments to deliver measurable latency/reliability/scalability/cost advantages versus DevOps-heavy incumbents like AWS IoT Core.”

“Candidate brings experience across both startups and big tech, along with direct exposure to pitching ideas to several VCs. They show a practical founder mindset centered on rapid prototyping, customer feedback, retention, and building AI/agent-driven products with strong product-market fit potential.”