Chief technology officer

About Caspira

Caspira is an Applied AI company building production-grade AI products. We work across multiple innovative products spanning from citizen services, mobility, transport, voice systems, and to public safety. Our engineering and delivery standards are benchmarked against top-tier consulting and product organizations worldwide. Our team is based in Baku and staffed with international advisors from top-tier institutions and universities.

About the role

Caspira builds and delivers sovereign AI for the institutions that run a country - government bodies, state-owned enterprises, and national infrastructure operators across a broad range of sectors. Everything we ship runs on sovereign infrastructure with Azerbaijan data residency. That constraint is not a feature; it is the foundation of how we are trusted in the rooms we operate in.

We are looking for a Chief Technology Officer who can do two hard things at once and do them at the same level. First, own the technical architecture and delivery of a portfolio of concurrent AI engagements across government and critical infrastructure - and stay close enough to the code and the systems to make the calls that matter. Second, walk into a high-level state meeting or the boardroom of a state-owned enterprise and carry the room: explain the architecture, defend the sovereignty and security posture, set realistic expectations, and leave the client more confident than when they arrived.

This is not a figurehead CTO role. It is a builder-leader role. You will be the highest technical authority in the company and the person clients trust to deliver above and beyond what they were promised.

What you will own

Technical architecture and sovereign delivery. Set and hold the architecture across every engagement. Make the build-vs-integrate, model-selection, and infrastructure decisions. Guarantee that data residency, sovereignty, and the hosting posture are correct by design in every system we ship - not retrofitted.

AI and ML systems. Own the technical direction across the full range of AI applications we deliver - from large and small language models, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation, to conversational and agentic systems, analytics and anomaly detection, and the safety, guardrail, and privacy-preserving layers that make any of it deployable in a sovereign, regulated setting. Pick the right approach for each problem, on sovereign infrastructure, with Azerbaijani, Russian, and English coverage where the use case requires it.

Engineering organisation and delivery. Lead the engineering team across multiple parallel client squads. Own the bar for quality, the grading framework (the L1-L6 scale), hiring, technical onboarding, and the engineering practices that let small, senior teams deliver fast. Drive an AI-native engineering culture (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot are already in use). Make sure engineers on short, high-stakes engagements can wear multiple hats without the work suffering.

Client and stakeholder engagement. Be the technical voice of Caspira in high-level state meetings and in front of state-owned enterprise leadership. Present architectures, defend design choices, scope realistically, and translate between deep technical detail and senior decision-makers. This is roughly a "CTO plus consultant" register: technically unimpeachable and commercially fluent in the same breath.

Delivery governance. Operate inside a structured governance model (Steering Committee / Product and Delivery Council / Integrated Squads, with clear DACI decision rights). Keep delivery honest: realistic timelines, no over-engineered staffing, customer-side roles (compliance, security, governance) left on the customer side where they belong on integration projects.

Security, compliance, and trust. Own the security and data-protection posture across the portfolio. Keep it aligned with Azerbaijan's Personal Data Law, the national AI strategy direction, and the EU AI Act expectations that increasingly shape high-risk public-sector AI. Make the sovereignty story defensible to a sceptical auditor, not just a friendly one.

Partner and vendor technical diligence. Run the technical diligence on technology partners before they appear in any client-facing or government-facing material. Decide what we build, what we integrate, and what we do not touch.

The portfolio you will be responsible for (scope, not a checklist)

A sense of the breadth - the work spans a broad and growing portfolio of concurrent AI engagements across government bodies, state-owned enterprises, and national infrastructure operators. It covers citizen and public services, operations and analytics, security, education, and digital infrastructure, among other areas. The specific applications vary by client; the constant is that each must be sovereign, secure, and delivered to a standard that holds up at the highest level.

You will not run all of these yourself. You will own that all of them are architecturally sound, secure, sovereign, delivered, and defensible.

Must-have qualifications

• Exceptional, hands-on engineering background. A track record at a top-tier engineering organisation (large-scale technology, quantitative finance, or a high-growth startup as a founding or early senior engineer) where you personally designed and shipped systems that mattered. You can still read and write the code, design the data model, and find the bottleneck.
• 8+ years of engineering, with real architecture ownership of production systems at scale - distributed systems, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and the operational discipline that keeps Tier-0 services up.
• Genuine AI / ML depth. Not "managed a team that did AI" - you understand LLMs, fine-tuning, RAG, model evaluation, safety and guardrails, and the practical trade-offs between large models and smaller specialised ones. You can judge a vendor's claims and call out the ones that do not hold.
• Executive presence with senior stakeholders. Demonstrated ability to lead technical conversations with C-level, board, and senior state decision-makers and earn their trust. You are calm, precise, and credible under scrutiny.
• Delivery leadership. You have led engineers and shipped under real deadlines and real accountability - hiring, growing, and setting the quality bar for a team.
• Sovereignty and security instinct. You treat data residency, security posture, and compliance as first-order architecture concerns, not paperwork.
• In-country availability. Able to be in Baku for high-level state and client engagement on the cadence the work demands.
• Communication. Azerbaijani and strong English are both required; Russian is an advantage given the client base and the language coverage our systems require.

Strong-plus

• Founding-engineer or technical-cofounder experience (built something from zero)
• Public-sector, regulated-industry, or critical-infrastructure delivery
• Experience with privacy-preserving ML techniques in production (differential privacy, federated learning, on-device inference)
• Familiarity with sovereign-cloud or regulated-data environments
• Conversational / agentic AI, NLP for low-resource languages, or analytics and security-monitoring backgrounds
• Comfort operating in a structured client-governance model (steering committees, decision-rights frameworks)

What "above and beyond" looks like in the first 6-12 months

• Every live engagement has a clean, defensible architecture and a sovereignty / security posture that survives external scrutiny.
• The engineering team is delivering predictably across parallel squads, with a clear grading and quality bar in place.
• Senior state and SOE stakeholders treat you as the technical authority they call before they make a decision - not after.
• Technology-partner diligence is complete before any partner is named in front of a government client.
• Caspira has shipped at least one engagement that the client describes as beyond what they expected.