From the listing
About the role
Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce.
As Chief Technology Officer, you will drive execution for the product and engineering teams and put AI at the core of everything the company builds. You will own Toptal’s full technical architecture, building it AI-first utilizing best practices for agentic engineering.
You will be a builder and an architect who solves problems in the system itself, setting the technical direction and turning strategy into production-ready outcomes. You will collaborate closely with Product to design infrastructure that exposes core business logic through modular interfaces.
What you'll do
- Own Toptal’s AI technology strategy and architecture, including model selection, fine-tuning, harness design, and cost control.
- Deploy agentic engineering at scale against core business processes like matching, vetting, and onboarding.
- Make AI quality measurable by owning evals, regression suites, and review loops.
- Rebuild platform operations to raise output per engineer through AI-assisted development and testing.
- Own resourcing and workforce planning, including scoping roadmaps, planning headcount, and hiring A-players.
- Own the end-to-end architecture, throughput, and reliability of the platform.
- Manage the engineering and AI cost structure, including inference and token spend.
- Coach engineers on agentic best practices and push AI adoption into every function at Toptal.
What they're looking for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 15+ years of progressive engineering leadership, including time as a CTO, VP of Engineering, or direct report to one.
- Deep, hands-on command of modern AI engineering: foundation models, agentic architectures, retrieval, and fine-tuning.
- Experience shipping and operating agentic systems at scale with measured business outcomes.
- Proven command of AI economics, including model routing, inference capacity, and cost budgets.
- Currently hands-on with the ability to read and write code and analyze distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
- Experience scaling and modernizing large existing codebases and replacing load-bearing systems in flight.
- Experience leading a globally distributed, remote team at a technology or hyper-growth company.
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills in English.
Nice to have
- Advanced degree in a technical field.
- Experience with high-volume, two-sided marketplaces or multi-tenant platforms.
From the company page
Toptal benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Work wherever, on your terms. Being a fully-remote workforce means that all you need is wifi and a laptop. You can work from home, your favorite cafe, or even a charming villa halfway around the world.”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Toptal
Toptal has one of my favorite (and clear) remote work policies:
Work Remotely
Work wherever, on your terms. Being a fully-remote workforce means that all you need is wifi and a laptop. You can work from home, your favorite cafe, or even a charming villa halfway around the world.
I would love to see a little more information about the perks and benefits Toptal offers its employees.
Note: They do NOT appear to be a Hire From Anywhere (HFA) company. You likely need to be eligible to apply for certain positions.