Join our team at Parts Order, a seed-stage startup operating at the
intersection of AI and audio engineering, with a focus on spatial and 3D
audio, including Dolby Atmos. We deliver best-in-class spatial audio mastering
while significantly lowering the barrier to entry for artists, audio
engineers, and labels alike.
We are looking for a **Chief Technology Officer** to lead our engineering
efforts into the next phase of growth. This is a hands-on leadership role for
someone who has **built and shipped ML-powered products ideally in an audio or
music technology context.** You'll set the technical vision and strategy while
staying deeply involved in building the product. If you're energized by both
architecting systems and shipping code (and you have a passion for audio!)
we'd love to hear from you.
Parts Order is a fully remote company with team members distributed across
multiple time zones from PT to CET.
### The Role
This is a **CTO + Individual Contributor** position. You'll split your time
between hands-on engineering work and leading a small, high-impact team of 2–3
engineers. As we grow, the leadership component will expand, but we need
someone who can ship production code today while building the foundation for
tomorrow.
You'll work closely with the CEO to shape product direction and collaborate
with our QA and Audio teams to ensure we deliver exceptional quality.
### Responsibilities
### Leadership & Strategy
* Define and execute the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for Parts Order's platform.
* Build, mentor, and manage a growing engineering team across backend, frontend, and ML disciplines.
* Establish engineering culture, processes, and best practices that scale with the company.
* Partner with the CEO on product strategy, prioritization, and resource allocation.
* Collaborate with QA and Audio teams to maintain high standards across the platform.
* Own technical hiring as the team grows: identify talent, lead interviews, and make hiring decisions.
### Hands-On Engineering
* Design, develop, deploy, and maintain scalable backend services for our AI-driven spatial audio platform.
* Build and optimize APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure for batch processing workloads.
* Integrate digital signal processing (DSP) techniques and machine learning components into production.
* Improve development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and observability across the platform.
* Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions and manage technical debt effectively.
### Requirements
### Leadership Experience
* 3+ years of experience managing mid-sized engineering teams (5–15 engineers) across frontend, backend, and ML roles.
* Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers.
* Experience setting technical direction and making architectural decisions at the organizational level.
* Strong communication skills: able to translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Comfort operating in ambiguity and adapting quickly in an early-stage environment.
### Technical Skills
* Strong Python development skills in production settings (5+ years preferred).
* Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code in an ML Ops context.
* Deep experience building and maintaining backend services and APIs (FastAPI, Flask, or similar).
* Solid knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
* Familiarity with the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle.
* Experience with audio and DSP libraries (NumPy, Librosa, SciPy, Pedalboard).
* An appreciation for music, whether as a maker, listener, or explorer 🧡
### Nice-to-Haves
* Prior experience as a technical co-founder or early engineering leader at a startup.
* Familiarity with modern web technologies (React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS).
* Hands-on experience with music production, audio engineering, and DAWs (Ableton Live, Pro Tools).