Chief of Staff to the CTO

The honest pitch

This role exists to produce a founder. Not to retain you for a decade.

If you want to start your own company as a technical founder in 2 or 3 years, and you want to arrive there having already operated one end to end (infra, security, compliance, product, customers), this is the fastest compression of that learning we know how to offer. If you are optimizing for a stable career ladder, this is the wrong job, and we say that with respect.

Who we are

anyformat is a European Document Intelligence platform. We turn unstructured documents into structured, auditable data through a composable architecture of operators and workflows, and we do it for the documents that break other tools: complex layouts, nested tables, low-quality scans. We are a seed-stage team of ~13 in Madrid, ISO 27001 certified, in production with enterprise clients, and built by engineers for engineers.

The mission

Your mandate: extend the CTO. You cover the ground he should be covering and cannot reach.

Part of that is agentizing the company: where something runs on manual work today, you build the agent that runs it instead. You will not be the person filling in security questionnaires; you will build the agent that does. But the more interesting half is inventing what does not exist yet: internal agentic products like anyformat-brain, a knowledge base every person on the team plugs into, or the tools nobody asked for because nobody knew they were possible. This is a generalist role with an innovator's core, not a fixer's backlog.

Phase 1 (first months): operate and automate the inside

• Own our compliance and security surface: ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, security and compliance checks from enterprise clients. First run it, then automate it until it takes a fraction of your time.
• Own IT and platform administration: identity, access, GitHub/GitLab, internal tooling.
• Build and maintain internal agentic applications for the whole company, not just engineering: some replace manual work, others create capabilities we did not have.
• Maintain our benchmarks: the evaluation suites that tell us, release after release, how good the product really is.
• Make the whole company more agentic: spread the tools, patterns and habits until working with agents is everyone's default, not just yours.
• Prototype the CTO's ideas: fast, throwaway when needed, production-bound when they work.

Phase 2 (once the inside runs itself): get close to customers

• Forward-deployed work with enterprise clients: scoping, deploying and tuning workflows on their real documents.
• Solutions engineering alongside our GTM team.
• This is deliberate sequencing. Customer work is where you learn how software actually gets bought and deployed, and you will have earned the context to do it well.

What the role really is

You sit next to the founders. You are in the room for technical strategy, hiring, and roadmap conversations. Quarterly missions with a visible outcome, not a static list of responsibilities.

The unglamorous parts are real and we will not pretend otherwise. A founding CTO eats operational work every single day. The difference here is the deal: you automate it, you do not (just) absorb it. If nine months in you are still doing anything repetitive by hand, one of us has failed.

Who we are looking for

• 2 to 4 years of experience as a software engineer, with at least one thing you have shipped end to end, alone, that people actually used. Side projects count. Failed startups count double.
• Agentic-native. You already build with agents as a default, not as a demo. You have opinions about where they break.
• Founder trajectory. You want to start a company, and you can articulate why this role gets you there faster than joining a big lab or staying where you are.
• Comfortable with breadth. Compliance docs in the morning, an internal agent after lunch, a customer workflow in the evening. If that sounds chaotic instead of energizing, this is not for you.
• Strong written and spoken English. Spanish is a plus for client work in our first market.

In short: a versatile, hungry, genuinely good software engineer who wants to be a technical founder in 2 or 3 years.

What you get

• Equity. Meaningful ownership, so the upside you help create is also yours.
• Direct access to both founders and to how a seed-stage company is actually run: fundraising, enterprise sales, hiring, the parts you never see as an IC elsewhere.
• Real customers with real documents, not a sandbox.
• Madrid, onsite preferred: this role works by being in the room.

Process

1. Intro conversation with the CTO.
2. A short take-home that mirrors the actual job: automate a real process with agents. Timeboxed, paid if it goes beyond a few hours.
3. Deep-dive on something you built end to end.
4. Conversation with the CEO.

Send us what you have built, not a cover letter.