CTO / Technical Co-Founder (Trigger)

Trigger is creating the brain behind content strategy: an AI-driven analytics and intelligence platform that uses contextual and behavioral data to help teams uncover what's working, why it's working, what to publish next, and ultimately grow top-performing social media channels.

Our success is built on three pillars:

• A team that approaches problems through a cognitive and psychology-first lens, with social and marketing as the natural extensions.
• A venture studio (Builders) with a proven track record in building AI-native startups from the ground up.
• Europe’s most successful social-media-driven companies as design partners.

About the role

We're looking for a full-stack AI Co-Founder / CTO to design and build Trigger's cognitive engine, the system that turns creative behavior into understanding.

You'll own the entire stack: from multimodal AI (processing video, images, audio, and text) to web architecture (frontend, backend, data pipelines) to production deployment. This isn't just ML/LLM engineering or just web development. It's both, deeply integrated.

You'll be the architect of meaning: designing how creative data becomes structured knowledge, how that knowledge learns, and how it translates into creative foresight.

This is one of the hardest problems in applied AI: context engineering at scale across multimodal data. You'll build systems that understand why stories resonate — from visual hooks to audio emotion to narrative structure — not just what happened.

You'll partner closely with Federico Motta, who brings deep expertise in content behavior, narrative psychology, and audience intelligence. Federico brings the why; you'll build the how.

What you'll own

• Architecture & systems: Define Trigger's AI and data architecture — from multimodal ingestion to the contextual reasoning graph.
• AI & data modeling: Build learning loops that explain why creative works and what will work next.
• Context engineering: Transform unstructured creative data into structured, queryable knowledge — the hardest and most critical technical challenge.
• Infrastructure: Design scalable pipelines for text, image, and audio data with real-time retrieval and insight generation.
• Product engineering: Turn prototypes into production systems and lead the development of the first MVP.
• Team & culture: Hire, mentor, and inspire a small team of sharp builders. Establish the culture of technical excellence and curiosity.
• Strategic tech leadership: Own Trigger's technical differentiation, scalability, and investor readiness.

What you'll build

Trigger already analyzes creative data, clusters content patterns, and surfaces early insights.

Your mission: evolve it into a thinking system. Data → Context → Understanding → Prediction.

Core components:

• Context Graph: A living memory connecting creative assets, audience signals, and performance drivers.
• Insight Engine: A reasoning layer that converts data into causal understanding — "why it worked."
• Predictive Models: Forecast creative performance and simulate audience response.
• Creative Copilot: An interface that helps strategists ask, "What should we make next?"

You won't just build software, you'll design how machines understand storytelling.

Job requirements

What we're looking for

• Full-stack AI builder: You own the entire web stack AND the AI layer (multimodal embeddings, RAG, inference). You've shipped end-to-end AI products where the intelligence and interface are inseparable.
• Context engineering: You excel at the hardest problem in applied AI — translating qualitative creative patterns (visual hooks, emotional tone, narrative structure) into structured, learnable systems. You understand RAG systems, vector databases, and semantic reasoning.
• Hands-on builder: You code, prototype, and iterate fast. You're comfortable in ambiguity and love early-stage chaos. You ship MVPs in weeks, not months.
• Data architect: Experience building or scaling systems that handle structured + unstructured data at scale. You know when to use graphs vs vectors vs relational stores.
• Creative empathy: You appreciate storytelling and design as signal and structure, not just decoration. You get excited by the psychology of why content works.
• Leadership DNA: You've led small technical teams or been the go-to person for complex builds in startup or venture settings. You know how to recruit and inspire talent.
• Ethical & compliant: You know how to build responsibly: transient data, secure APIs, and GDPR-aligned pipelines. You design with privacy by default.

Ideal background

• 5+ years in full-stack / AI engineering, you've built both the web application (frontend/backend) AND the AI systems (multimodal embeddings, RAG, inference) in production.
• Experience shipping AI products with multimodal capabilities (video, image, audio, text processing at scale).
• Proficient with Python (FastAPI, ML libraries), TypeScript/Next.js, modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), and data tooling (vector DBs, graph databases) or similar.
• Strong understanding of context engineering: turning qualitative insights into structured, learnable systems.
• Excited by narrative intelligence, creative systems, and category creation.

Why this matters

Most tools measure what already happened. Trigger predicts what will happen next, and why.

This is category creation: We're not building a better analytics tool. We're building the cognitive layer that sits between creative intuition and data, a new way for brands to understand their audiences.

The technical challenge is extraordinary: Context engineering at scale across multimodal data (video, images, audio, text) is one of the hardest unsolved problems in applied AI. You'll design systems that understand storytelling psychology — visual hooks, emotional tone, narrative structure — not just metrics. And you'll ship it as a beautiful, fast web product.

The market timing is perfect: $2.2B → $10.3B market growth, validated customer pain (78% "hair-on-fire" score), committed design partners, and Builders Studio backing.

The upside is massive: Co-founder equity, path to €1M ARR in Year 1, and the chance to define how an entire industry thinks about creativity.

If you're fascinated by the intersection of AI, creativity, and cognition, this is a rare opportunity to build something that redefines how the creative world works.

This is not just an AI engineer role; it's a context systems designer, someone who architects meaning from creative chaos.

Tech stack (indicative)

• Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind/React
• Backend: Typescript or Python (FastAPI), Node.js, tRPC
• AI Layer: LangGraph / LangChain, OpenAI / Anthropic models
• Data Layer: Weaviate / pgvector / Pinecone, Neo4j / PostgreSQL
• Infra: Vercel, Supabase, Railway, Cloudflare or similar

Complementarity with Federico

Federico brings:

• Behavioral insight (psychology of content performance)
• Creative logic (why audiences respond to stories)
• User empathy (deep understanding of social media strategists' pain)
• Rapid prototyping (functional OAuth integrations, clustering scripts)

You'll bring:

• Structured intelligence (data pipelines, graph architecture)
• Scalable systems (production-ready infrastructure)
• AI orchestration (RAG, embeddings, multimodal reasoning)
• Technical leadership (team building, engineering culture)

Together: Creative intuition + Technical rigor = Cognitive layer for creativity