CTO | VC-backed AI | Relocate to Barcelona | €120–150k + 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 retr