About the role
Founding CTO at Redbolt.ai
Redbolt AI is the security and reliability layer for in-production AI systems. It’s the commercial open core evolution of NVIDIA's open source red-teaming framework, garak, and NeMo Guardrails. Redbolt builds on trusted open source technology and adds the security layer that empowers users to deploy AI at scale.
We're looking for a Founding CTO to build Redbolt into an era-defining AI technology. As the founding CTO, you’ll define initial product vision, build commercial features and an engineering team to accelerate product velocity, get closer to customers, and deepen open-source contributions to NVIDIA's Garak.
The opportunity
The market for AI security is early but moving fast. The risks of unguarded AI systems are well-known but the infrastructure to protect against these risks don’t really exist yet.
Redbolt starts with a meaningful foundation: NVIDIA's open-source tools already have community traction and credibility. Your job is to turn that into a product and company that enterprises depend on.
If you've been looking for the right moment to build something that matters, this is it.
The role
As the technical founder, you will:
- Defining the vision. What should this company become? What's the product roadmap that turns open-source adoption into a billion-dollar enterprise business? You'll own that strategy.
- Building the foundation. You're writing code, shipping product, and making architectural decisions that will compound for years.
- Hiring the team. You'll recruit and lead the engineers who build Redbolt alongside you.
- Partner with a CEO. Once there's traction, OCV will lead a search for a co-founder CEO to partner with you - someone to own go-to-market, fundraising, and business operations while you own product and engineering. You'll be deeply involved in selecting that person.
About you
You're a deep technical expert in LLM security, ML engineering, or adjacent infrastructure. You understand how these systems fail and how to prevent them.
You've operated at a high level technically: staff/principal engineer, engineering lead, or founded something yourself.
You're entrepreneurial. You've been waiting for the right opportunity to build something from the ground up, with real support and resources behind you.
You have conviction about the AI security space. You've thought about what needs to exist and have opinions about how to build it.
About Open Core Ventures
"As software has eaten the world, open source is eating software." — Peter Levine
Commercial open source software companies have captured hundreds of billions in enterprise value—yet this represents only a fraction of the trillions delivered by OSS today. We're still in the early innings.
GitLab co-founder and executive chair Sid Sijbrandij started Open Core Ventures (OCV) to accelerate this opportunity. We start companies around promising open source projects—the same approach that took GitLab from OSS project to IPO in seven years.
We recruit founders and help them reach escape velocity. We’ve started 30+ companies around open source projects, including Fleet, FlowFuse, and Mermaid Chart.
