Founding CTO

📍 Location: Copenhagen, Oslo, or remote from Sweden or Finland We are looking for an exceptional product builder to take full ownership of The Hub’s technical future and help us reinvent how startups hire. You might be an experienced CTO or former founder. You might be a strong product engineer ready to step into the role for the first time. We care less about your title and more about what you have built, the decisions you have owned and your ability to turn complicated problems into products people love.

THE OPPORTUNITY ⭐️

The Hub is the largest startup recruitment platform in the Nordics. Over the past decade, 15,000 startups have posted almost 100,000 jobs, generating three million applications and an estimated 50,000 hires. Today, we are profitable, serve 10,000 daily active users and have raised fresh capital from leading Nordic founders and angel investors. Now we are rebuilding The Hub for an AI-native future. As our Founding CTO, you will own the technical strategy, architecture and product development behind The Hub 2.0. You will personally build and ship while gradually assembling a small, exceptional engineering team around you.

WHAT YOU WILL DO 🛠️

You will own technology and product engineering from end to end:

• Technical strategy: Decide what to keep, rebuild or replace—and in what order.
• Product engineering: Design, build and ship products across frontend, backend, infrastructure and data.
• AI products: Create AI-native workflows that help startups and candidates find each other more effectively.
• Modernisation: Evolve a ten-year-old platform without slowing down the business it already supports.
• Architecture: Establish a scalable foundation for The Hub 2.0 across infrastructure, security, performance and observability.
• Product thinking: Work directly with users to decide which problems are worth solving and which features should ship first.
• Team building: Hire and lead the first one or two engineers who will help you build the next generation of The Hub.

You will have significant freedom, resources and support—but not a detailed specification telling you what to do. We want someone who can understand the business, challenge assumptions, make difficult decisions and turn ideas into working products.

WHO YOU ARE ☝️

To succeed in this role, you must be:

• A product builder: You want to create products, not merely manage engineers and attend meetings.
• Technically broad: You can work across frontend, backend, infrastructure, data and AI—even if you are deeper in some areas than others.
• Pragmatic: You know when to improve an existing system and when rebuilding is genuinely the right answer.
• AI-native: Tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or similar are already part of how you work.
• Customer-focused: You think about the user, product and technology simultaneously.
• High-agency: You take ownership, make decisions and move forward without waiting for perfect information.
• Low-ego: You care more about building something exceptional than being the smartest person in the room (atlhought you probably are).

You will not be a fit if:

• You want a pure management role and no longer enjoy building.
• You need detailed specifications before getting started.
• You automatically prefer a complete rewrite over working pragmatically with a living system.
• You view product decisions as someone else’s responsibility.
• You believe AI is mostly hype—or use it only to generate the occasional snippet.

WHAT WE OFFER ❤️

• Founder-level ownership of The Hub’s technology and product.
• 3–8% equity and a competitive salary based on experience and fit.
• A rare combination of startup freedom and an established platform with significant distribution.
• The resources to hire your first one or two engineers.
• The opportunity to build at the forefront of AI-native recruitment.
• Direct impact on thousands of startups and millions of candidates.
• A brand-new MacBook, wellbeing and phone budget, flexible work and five weeks of paid holiday.
• A small, ambitious team without politics, silos or process theatre.

The hardest part of this role is also what makes it exciting: you must build the future while improving a platform that thousands of people already depend on. Submit your application by providing your LinkedIn profile and answering two short questions. Show us what you have built, how you approach difficult technical decisions and why you believe you are the person to build The Hub 2.0.