Head of Engineering / Founding CTO - AI SaaS

Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia - on-site / hybrid
We're building a local team and want to work as a team together, and to collaborate in person
as needed, so this role is for candidates in (or willing to relocate to / regularly commute to) the Halifax area.

About the opportunity;

We're an early-stage, founder-owned Canadian SaaS startup building an AI-powered social-media marketing and lead-generation platform. The product automates on-brand, compliant content and turns it into qualified leads, a space the current tools don't serve well.
The founder is looking for the most senior technical person: the owner of architecture and engineering, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the founder to turn the vision into a real, shippable product, and to build the team that ships it.
This starts as a fractional engagement (about 1-2 days/week) and is designed to convert to a full-time Head of Engineering/CTO role as we ramp up. We're looking for a builder-leader, not an advisor.

What you'll own;

• The technology architecture and the key build-vs-buy decisions (we'll lean on third-party APIs early, e.g., a unified social-posting layer, and bring things in-house as we scale).
• Our AI approach (model routing, retrieval, a qualifying chatbot, content generation) kept vendor flexible.
• Security and compliance posture; we handle users' social/CRM tokens and applicants' personal data in any regulated industry.
• Hiring and managing a small engineering team (full-stack, integrations, AI), starting with helping us choose the first engineers/Product Design.
• Translating technical progress, risks, and costs into plain language for the founder.

What we're looking for;

• 8+ years building software, with production SaaS experience, you've shipped, not just prototyped.
• Took at least one product from zero to real users, ideally helped it scale.
• Full-stack + cloud architecture depth; comfortable with modern web stacks, databases, queues, and cloud infrastructure.
• Has hired and led engineers.
• Strong build-vs-buy and cost judgment; you know when to buy a managed service and when to build.
• Can explain technical trade-offs clearly to the owner (this is essential).
• Bonus: third-party API / OAuth integration experience, applied AI/LLM work, and exposure to fintech, finance, or other regulated/compliance-heavy products.

Process;

Intro call → Portfolio review → technical deep-dive → a short trial task (review our build plan under NDA and other legal documents, propose your architecture and approach) → references → offer.
Only strong believers’ candidates welcome it.