Founding Chief Technology Officer

About Telluscope

Telluscope is building the intelligence layer for pollution risk in the physical world. Pollution exposure affects properties, people, businesses, and financial assets everywhere — but the data needed to understand it is fragmented, trapped in PDFs, and requires specialized expertise to interpret.

The risk is only becoming more complex and costly. Floods and wildfires can mobilize contaminants in unexpected ways, while emerging contaminants like PFAS, evolving regulation, and mounting evidence linking environmental exposure to human health are creating new dimensions of liability.

Our vision is a world where pollution risk is as legible and actionable as any other financial risk. We believe Telluscope will become the infrastructure connecting what happens in the physical world — contamination, chemicals, groundwater, land use, and remediation — to the decisions insurers, investors, lenders, and property owners make. By making pollution risk visible and quantifiable for every property on Earth, we can help direct capital and action toward remediation.

We’re using AI and advanced geospatial analysis to build a world model of pollution risk — understanding what risks exist today and how they may change over time. We’re starting in environmental insurance, where our model turns complex risk into faster, clearer underwriting decisions.

Founded at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Telluscope is supported by leading advisors across climate technology, insurance, and the built environment. We're building a mission-driven, low-ego team grounded in intellectual honesty, curiosity, humility, and collaboration.

Role Description

We are seeking an exceptional Founding CTO to join Telluscope’s founding team, shape the direction of the company, and own meaningful equity. For the right technical leader, this is a rare opportunity to build a category-defining system from first principles—one that makes an invisible global risk measurable, actionable, and ultimately investable.

You will define Telluscope’s technical vision, build the initial product, and lay the foundation for a world-class engineering and applied-science organization. You will be deeply hands-on in the early stages and, as the company grows, recruit and lead a multidisciplinary team spanning software engineering, geospatial systems, and environmental modeling.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute Telluscope’s technical vision, architecture, and roadmap.

• Lead hands-on product development from 0→1 through enterprise deployment.

• Architect AI-native systems that combine unstructured documents, geospatial data, time-series data, remote sensing, scientific models, and proprietary datasets.

• Develop approaches for spatial reasoning, entity resolution, uncertainty quantification, and environmental risk modeling.

• Establish rigorous evaluation, monitoring, and feedback systems for model outputs.

• Work directly with customers, design partners, and domain experts to translate complex workflows into successful product deployments.

• Make foundational decisions around technology stack, cloud infrastructure, security, compliance, scalability, and reliability.

• Partner with the founder on product strategy, fundraising, hiring, company planning, and communicating the technical vision to customers and investors.

About You

First and foremost, you are an exceptional technical builder who knows how to ship production-quality software. You are excited by difficult problems at the intersection of AI, geospatial systems, scientific modeling, and high-stakes decision-making. You enjoy working with complex, imperfect data and are comfortable developing systems where the correct answer is probabilistic rather than obvious. You can move quickly in a 0→1 environment while maintaining the rigor, explainability, and reliability required for enterprise and financial applications.

You have:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in technical leadership; prior experience as a founding engineer, head of engineering, or CTO is strongly preferred.

• A track record building and scaling production software in startup or high-growth environments.

• Experience with knowledge graphs, entity resolution, multimodal data fusion, and/or large-scale geospatial systems.

• Experience in regulated, scientific, insurance, climate, or other high-trust industries.

• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area/ willing to relocate.

• A passion for building durable, consequential technology, and for advancing sustainability through rigorous, real-world solutions.

• An advanced degree in geophysics, hydrogeology, environmental engineering, applied mathematics, physics, computer science, computational science, or a related quantitative field is a plus, as is experience with groundwater flow, subsurface modeling, or contaminant fate and transport.