Founder's Office, Technical (CTO)

About the role

This is not a traditional engineering role. This is a seat at the table. You will work directly with Prodigal's CTO across the full breadth of building a frontier AI company - technical roadmap, AI projects, customer conversations, GTM collaboration, hiring, and everything in between. Think of it as an accelerated apprenticeship for a future CTO or technical founder. You will be handed ambiguity, context, and trust - and expected to run with it. Over one year, you will touch more dimensions of company building than most engineers see in a decade. We are looking for someone in explore mode - technically sharp, intellectually restless, and hungry to understand how great companies are built from the inside.

Responsibilities

• AI Projects & Technical Execution
• Lead high-priority AI projects end-to-end - voice AI, LLM reasoning, evaluation frameworks, and agentic systems - from research to production
• Work hands-on with frontier models, prompt engineering, real-time voice pipelines, and PIE, Prodigal's Intelligence Engine powering millions of live consumer finance conversations
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities and support pragmatic build-vs-integrate decisions alongside the CTO
• Strategy, Customers & GTM
• Participate in roadmap discussions, competitive analysis, and translating customer insights into engineering direction
• Join customer conversations and escalations; collaborate with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success on technical enablement and thought leadership that represents Prodigal at the cutting edge
• Hiring, Culture & Operations
• Participate in recruiting - evaluating submissions, interviewing, building assessment frameworks - particularly for campus hiring from premier institutions
• Be a sounding board for architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and team dynamics; help identify gaps before they become problems
• What You Bring
• Strong CS fundamentals with hands-on Python and/or TypeScript - you write clean, production-ready code
• 0 to 5 years of experience; in explore mode, not exploit mode - still building, still hungry, not optimizing a narrow lane
• Genuine curiosity about AI - you read papers, build side projects, and form opinions about where the technology is heading
• High bias for action, comfort with ambiguity, and clear communication across engineers, customers, and executives
• A builder's mentality - you've made things that required sustained effort to bring into existence
• Even Better
• Hands-on experience with LLMs - prompt engineering, evaluation, fine-tuning, or building LLM-powered applications
• Exposure to voice AI, real-time systems, or agentic architectures
• Considering a Masters in CS or AI, or recently completed one
• Why This Role
• Compounding Learning at an Uncommon Pace
• Most early-career engineers spend years getting depth in one domain. This role gives you breadth and depth simultaneously - AI, product, customers, hiring, company building - all in one year, directly alongside a technical co-founder.
• Proximity to the Frontier
• Voice AI that reasons, decides, and acts in real-time financial conversations is one of the hardest applied AI problems being worked on right now. You will be building it, not reading about it.
• A Blueprint for What You Want to Become
• Whether you want to be a CTO, a technical founder, or a world-class AI researcher - this role is designed to accelerate that path. Real ownership, real stakes, increasing responsibility as you demonstrate it.
• Job Benefits:
• World-class team - You'll get the chance to learn from (and teach) some of the brightest and most skilled people you'll ever meet. Our team members have been part of BCG, Deloitte, EY, Blackstone, Meta, Am

Additional Information

At Prodigal, we are building AI Agents for loan servicing and collections. Founded in 2018 by IITB alumni, our journey began with one bold mission: to eradicate the inefficiencies and confusion that have plagued the lending and collections industry for decades. We are backed by Y Combinator, Accel and Menlo Ventures. Today, we stand at the forefront of a seismic shift in the industry, building Agentic AI applications for consumer finance. Powered by our cutting-edge platform, Prodigal's Intelligence Engine (PIE), we're creating the next-generation agentic workforce - one that empowers companies to achieve unprecedented levels of operational excellence and intelligence. With over half a billion consumer finance interactions processed and a growing impact on more than 100 leading companies across North America, we've established ourselves as the go-to partner for organizations that demand more from their AI solutions. Our unparalleled experience, coupled with our trusted customer relationships, uniquely positions us to build Agentic AI applications that will revolutionize the future of consumer finance. At Prodigal, we are driven by a singular, unrelenting purpose: to transform how consumer finance companies engage with their customers and, in turn, drive successful outcomes for all.

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