Technical Co-Founder / CTO for a Machine Learning Startup

Valora Digital is the tech unit of Valora, a European retailer with more than 2’700 stores. We are a team of engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, growth marketers and product managers that tackle projects that delight customers, improve processes and make the company ready for the future of retail. We call ourselves builders & doers instead of thinkers & talkers because we pride ourselves on taking ownership of projects from A to Z and not letting anything get in the way of shipping.

When our world-class solutions have the potential to stand on their own in the marketplace, we spin them out into their own companies. We believe we’ve found a once in a generation opportunity to reshape retail and are looking for a technical co-founder to take on this challenge. You will be responsible for building the product and the team while being able to count on the full support of Valora Digital. As the sole founder, you’ll rely on your entrepreneurial abilities as well as your broad technical skills and will not shy away from areas you don’t have any experience in yet.
We’re not ready to share our project with the world just yet, but we will be happy to let you in on all the details at the beginning of the interview process.

Key tasks and responsibilities

• Hire a team of world-class engineers with experience in Machine Learning (with a focus on deep learning and computer vision), distributed systems, web applications and hardware
• Lead the ideation, technical development and launch of the product
• Establish a shared mission, vision, strategy and goals across your team
• Take responsibility for architectural decisions and defend them against all stakeholders
• Lead the setup of the training and production pipelines for our ML models and the deployment environment for our other systems
• Set up a modern development workflow and processes for your team, including a continuous integration pipeline and automated deployments
• Lead by example by writing well-tested, concise code
• Support your team with (technical) guidance and be a “Serving Leader” to them
• Coordinate with your stakeholders at Valora to define the technical and product strategy
• Represent your team and priorities inside and outside the company

Key skills / requirements

• Minimum of 5 years of professional software development experience in a general-purpose programming language
• BSc, MSc or PhD in computer science, machine learning, statistics, mathematics, physics, engineering, bioinformatics or equivalent demonstrable practical experience
• Experience with Tensorflow and/or PyTorch, Cloud Computing and Python
• Experience with running Machine Learning models in production (MLOps)
• Leadership experience
• Likeable personality with good communication skills
• Excellent spoken and written communication skills in English

Desirable:

• Experience as a startup founder
• Experience working with one or more of the following: computer vision, web application development, distributed and parallel systems, service-oriented / event-driven architectures, developing large software systems
• Experience in the retail industry

What we offer

• The opportunity to de-risk your startup journey, with us covering initial funding rounds and taking care of administrative tasks (payroll, etc.) to ensure you can focus fully on developing the product
• Mentorship and sparring with other experienced entrepreneurs at Valora Digital, stemming from diverse backgrounds including tech startups and strategy consulting
• Competitive salary and equity stake
• Office space with roof terrace in the heart of Zurich, equipped with free snacks and free drinks
• Access to a network of 2700 stores spanning 5 countries, a customer base of 5 million people and over 100 years of retail experience