Job Overview
Location
San Francisco
Job Type
Full-time
Category
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Date Posted
February 27, 2026
Full Job Description
đź“‹ Description
- • As the Field CTO for the Media & Entertainment (M&E) vertical at Lavendo Inc., you will be the pivotal technical leader, acting as the de facto Head of Engineering for this dynamic sector. Your primary responsibility will be to forge deep, strategic technical partnerships with C-suite executives (CTOs, CIOs) at leading Agency Holding Companies, AAA Gaming Studios, and pioneering Generative AI model companies. You will guide these organizations in their transformation into AI-Native Tech Platforms, ensuring they leverage our cutting-edge AI cloud infrastructure to its fullest potential.
- • This role transcends traditional Sales Engineering or Evangelism. You are the strategic technical owner for the M&E vertical, tasked with bridging the complex physics of advanced AI infrastructure with the tangible business objectives of the industry's most innovative players. Your success will be measured by your ability to drive real, scalable engineering outcomes that directly impact product direction and revenue.
- • You will own the end-to-end technical strategy for critical, high-stakes engagements. This includes architecting solutions for large-scale data consolidation projects within global agency holding companies and overseeing complex infrastructure migrations for major AAA studios. Your solutions must be engineered for real-world scalability and resilience, going far beyond the capabilities of a typical Proof of Concept (POC).
- • A key aspect of your role involves forensic requirement gathering. You will delve beneath the surface of stated problems to uncover the underlying technical truths. This means translating vague business goals, such as 'reducing ad costs,' into precise, actionable engineering requirements, like 'optimizing inference batch size on L40 GPUs to achieve a 30% reduction in cost-per-token.' You will meticulously assess each customer's current position on the spectrum from a basic Service Bureau to a sophisticated Tech Platform, and then prescribe the exact infrastructure interventions necessary to propel their advancement.
- • You will be instrumental in shaping our M&E ecosystem strategy. This involves identifying, engaging, and technically validating relationships with the most crucial Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) within the media landscape. Your role extends to defining definitive reference architectures that ensure key M&E tools operate optimally on our platform. This is not merely about 'support'; it's about setting the industry standard for how these tools perform with our infrastructure.
- • Internally, you will wield significant influence. You will chair a quarterly M&E Product Summit, collaborating closely with Core Engineering leadership. Armed with forensic evidence gathered from the field, you will prioritize and justify the vertical's product roadmap, ensuring it aligns with market needs and customer success.
- • You will also drive crucial alignment between field learnings and internal product and engineering priorities, acting as the voice of the customer and the market within the organization. Furthermore, you will provide direct engineering leadership, guiding teammates to build the most impactful solutions at the right time. This includes the development of high-leverage assets such as scalable quick-start reference architectures, exemplified by guides like 'Deploying Llama-405B for Ad Copy Creation.'
- • Your expertise will be critical in helping customers navigate the complexities of AI infrastructure, from understanding the nuances of GPU architectures (H100 vs. L40s) and Kubernetes orchestration to mastering high-performance parallel file systems (e.g., Lustre, WEKA) and intricate networking constraints (InfiniBand/Ethernet).
- • You will possess a deep understanding of inference optimization, including model serving intricacies such as batch sizes, quantization, KV caching, and the critical latency tradeoffs required for both massive throughput and real-time (sub-50ms) applications.
- • Industry fluency in at least two of the following M&E sub-sectors is essential: Gaming, Multimodal Generative Models, AdTech, or VFX. This deep domain knowledge will enable you to speak the language of our clients and anticipate their evolving needs.
- • You must possess the acumen to distinguish between customers who require raw bare-metal access and those who benefit from managed endpoints, and possess the wisdom to prescribe the most appropriate path forward for each.
- • Travel expectations for this role are between 10–20%, primarily for executive meetings and attendance at key industry events, allowing you to stay connected with the pulse of the M&E technology landscape.
🎯 Requirements
- • 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or distributed systems.
- • Deep, production-grade expertise in GPU architectures (H100 vs. L40s), Kubernetes orchestration, high-performance parallel file systems (e.g., Lustre, WEKA), and networking constraints (InfiniBand/Ethernet).
- • Executive presence with the ability to command a room and present complex technical roadmaps to C-suite executives.
- • Industry fluency in at least two of the following M&E sub-sectors: Gaming, Multimodal Generative Models, AdTech, or VFX.
🏖️ Benefits
- • Competitive compensation package including base salary, significant OTE, and equity.
- • Comprehensive 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families.
- • Generous paid parental leave: 20 weeks for primary caregivers and 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.
- • 401(k) plan with up to 4% company match and immediate vesting.
- • Flexible remote work environment with monthly reimbursement for mobile and internet expenses.
Skills & Technologies
Go
Kubernetes
Remote
$295k-365k
About Lavendo Inc.
Lavendo is a sales‑specialist recruiting firm that connects startups and scaling companies with U.S.‑based sales talent—providing sourcing, pre‑vetting, candidate matching, and hiring support across roles from SDR to Head of Sales to accelerate go‑to‑market hiring.
