Website:
ink.co
Job details:
- Full-time · €120,000–€150,000 per year + generous equity
- Relocation to Barcelona provided
(Please fully read how to apply, at bottom).
Ink is a well-funded AI company backed by 500 Global, one of the earliest technical leaders at Google DeepMind + members of Anthropic’s technical team as angels, and other leading VCs.
We’re hiring our first permanent CTO to own technology and engineering.
You’ll work with me and our product designer in our Poblenou office in Barcelona, and lead our existing small team of remote full-stack engineers.
You’ll inherit a technical foundation and existing eng team with a supported handoff from a highly experienced interim CTO, who stays as a mentor.
WHAT IS INK?
A lot of running a company is keeping people, teams, and tools in sync.
A meeting changes the plan, but the spec doesn’t. Design moves, but the tickets don’t. Nobody notices until the work is already done.
Ink does that checking continuously.
It connects to a company’s tools and conversations, follows how work changes, catches when things stop lining up, and asks the right people to review and resolve them. This also gives people one connected picture of where the work stands.
Underneath that is a substantial systems problem: continuously ingesting enterprise data, reconciling it into a context graph, preserving history and provenance, and giving AI reliable context.
If Ink works, larger companies will trust us with a ton of their internal data. Product plans. Customer information. Internal conversations. Engineering work. Potentially source code. Sensitive company context from many different systems.
So permissions, security, isolation, provenance, auditability, reliability, and trust are not things we can bolt on later when an enterprise customer asks for SOC 2.
WHO AM I?
I’m Nick Budden, Ink’s founder and CEO.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickbudden/
I’m Canadian. I moved to Barcelona in August after about 15 years in Taiwan, where I built two VC-backed companies. Between them, our products have been used by millions of people. I led teams of around 40 and raised roughly $15m from top VCs.
Ink is company number three.
WHAT WILL YOU INHERIT?
Our interim CTO is Bert Nieves.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bertnieves/
Bert was my mentor for years before Ink existed. He also invested in the company.
He spent nearly a decade at Dell, including as Director of Software Engineering in software incubation and architecture. His work included an AI/ML incubation lab and architecture and delivery for a global telemetry platform.
He’s now building Ink’s first architecture, engineering systems, and team.
The platform is under active development: Python/FastAPI, React/TypeScript, Postgres, Neo4j, semantic retrieval, and GCP. You’ll inherit a modular backend and evolving engineering workflows, not a checklist of technologies you must already know.
We’re ready to hire. Bert gives us the time to get it right.
Bert is here for as long as we need him. We’ll design the transition with you, including full-time overlap with Bert and clear ownership throughout. You’ll understand the architecture, challenge what should change, and take the reins.
Then Bert leaves the day-to-day and remains an advisor and mentor. Other senior technical leaders around Ink are available for mentorship too.
You get the context behind the architecture, not just the architecture.
WHAT WILL YOU DO?
Own the architecture and keep building
You’ll own application, data, context graph, AI, security, and infrastructure architecture end to end.
We expect you to be hands-on, in the detail: data models, interfaces, permissions, state, failure modes, and implementation patterns the team can build against.
You’ll write code, particularly prototypes, architectural buildouts, difficult systems, and reference implementations that guide the team. There will also be ordinary production code.
Some decisions need detailed architecture. Others need a small experiment. You should know the difference.
We’ll set product priorities together. You’ll own engineering spending and investment within those priorities: what to build or buy, what can wait, and operating costs including inference, ingestion, storage, and infrastructure.
Lead our AI thinking
You’ll stay immersed in applied AI: research, models, open-source implementations, emerging techniques, and lessons from production. You’ll read, experiment, and bring that learning into product and architecture.
What can we build now that we couldn’t before? Which part of our system could become simpler? Which assumptions have stopped being true?
Then you’ll test it.
You’ll own how we establish that Ink’s findings and actions are useful and reliable: representative evaluations, permission-aware retrieval, safe actions, human review, latency, and cost.
Build how Ink builds software
We’re developing agentic workflows for requirements review, architecture review, implementation, PR and code review, QA, and testing.
Most of that machinery will be your responsibility, including personally coding important parts.
You’ll decide where agents help, where humans remain necessary, and whether the process is improving. More generated code obviously isn’t the measure. Better delivery, fewer defects, less rework, and a sensible human review load are more interesting.
Own security, infrastructure, and reliability
You’ll own authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, encryption, auditability, and secure data handling.
Which permissions apply to a summary derived from several sources? What happens when access changes or a source is deleted?
You’ll design and test how permissions, retention, and deletion work across retrieval, summaries, graph relationships, caches, and agent actions.
Cloud infrastructure, deployment, observability, SRE, incident response, performance, and reliability also sit with you. Other engineers will implement parts. You own the whole system.
Lead people and execution
Technical specs and work, figuring out sequencing, running standups, working in Jira/Linear, doing 1:1s, reviewing progress, unblocking engineers, and making sure things actually ship. You'll be fully managing the people, and their execution.
You’ll lead our engineers, personally recruit important hires, and develop people who can own systems and decisions independently.
You own code quality and the review process. You don’t have to review every PR yourself, but you must make sure the system works.
Shape the product and talk to customers
You’ll work with me and our designer while ideas are still taking shape. Technical possibilities should influence the product, and customer problems should influence the architecture.
You’ll join design-partner calls, technical discovery, security discussions, and the technical parts of sales and diligence. You’ll contribute to strategy, fundraising, and investor conversations where technical leadership matters. You'll sit with me and our designer, and "talk product."
ARE YOU A GOOD FIT?
Previous title: not very important.
- You might already be a CTO.
- You might be a principal or staff engineer who has led large technical systems.
- You might have run engineering somewhere.
- You might have founded a company.
We care more about the shape of your abilities.
You’ve architected, shipped, operated, and evolved substantial data-intensive or distributed systems. You’ve also personally architected serious multi-tenant enterprise software where sensitive data, permissions, and security mattered.
You’re strong at applied AI, still want to code, and can lead people, recruit, communicate complex systems clearly, and drive execution.
You don’t need a previous CTO title, an AI research pedigree, or to be a security specialist. Bert can help review and challenge your work.
But architecture, hands-on building, and engineering leadership are all part of this job. Being excellent at one doesn’t make the others optional.
We’re probably not a good fit for a manager who used to build but no longer wants to, a pure architect who does not want responsibility for execution, or an AI researcher who is not a strong product engineer.
ARE WE A GOOD FIT?
The three of us in Barcelona meet in person several times each week. These are working sessions, not status updates: critique, whiteboards, debate, decisions. Between them, we implement and test, then return with something more concrete:
https://soundcloud.com/nick-budden-350385204/podcast-clip
We want an Idea Lab culture, where people think independently and say what they actually believe:
https://youtu.be/FDW_cBQMKL8
We want humble perfectionists with practical judgment. High standards, low ego. Argue for an idea without becoming attached to winning, and be direct while remaining kind:
https://soundcloud.com/nick-budden-350385204/patrick-collison-en
When we disagree about something consequential, we keep digging. We surface assumptions, compare evidence, and test explanations until the conclusion makes sense to everyone’s independent thinking. Agreement shouldn’t just mean someone stopped speaking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc6mrqmeHF8
Expectations are high and the pace is fast. We need people who can do more with less, work with incomplete information, and move when the plan changes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57aKsH4M5qc
Please watch these. This way of working matters to us.
HOW TO APPLY
Email cto@ink.co (that is ".co", not .com.) with your LinkedIn or CV and relevant work.
Include a video introduction near the top of your email. I ask for this because it helps me filter out bulk AI-generated applications and focus on people who genuinely chose to apply. Don't make it fancy, just hit record on your iPhone.
Tell me about a difficult system you personally architected and built. What did you own, what happened after launch, how did the people you directly managed work together, and what would you change?
Explain your current AI engineering workflow, including one development you tested that changed your workflow, product thinking, or architecture.
Would love to hear from you.
Click on Apply to know more.