CTO & Co-Founder — Infrastructure Venture, Pre-Seed | Equity Partnership | Israel

NeedTech Labs is opening a founding technical seat on a new infrastructure venture, and we are looking for one person in Israel to take it.

About the venture

We build ventures the same way an investment committee would evaluate one — before a line of code exists. Each venture goes through a complete build cycle: the problem and who carries it, technical thesis and architecture, prior-art and competitive review, buyer segmentation, pricing and unit economics, go-to-market sequence, and a documented assessment of what could kill it. Only a small number survive that process.

This one did. It addresses a structural gap in enterprise infrastructure — a layer that engineering teams currently work around with tooling that is expensive, brittle, and widely acknowledged to be inadequate. The market is established, the buyers are identifiable, and the incumbent solutions have a known ceiling.

The complete venture package is shared under NDA with shortlisted candidates. It is a starting position, not a specification: the incoming CTO holds final authority over architecture and technical direction, including the authority to conclude that our approach is wrong.

The role

• This is a founder seat, not a senior hire. You are a co-owner of the company from the day it is incorporated, and the technical half of its leadership. Nobody will hand you a roadmap, a backlog, or a team. You will create all three.

• Build. The first version comes out of your hands. You will make the foundational architecture decisions — data model, system boundaries, language and infrastructure choices, the trade-offs between speed to first deployment and what will still hold at scale — and then write the code that proves them. Early on there is no one to delegate to, and the decisions made in those months will constrain the company for years.

• Deploy. Getting to a working system is half the work. You will take it into real environments: production reliability, security architecture, deployment and release discipline, monitoring, and the compliance groundwork enterprise buyers require before they will consider you. Design partners will run this against live systems, and you will be the person on the other end when something breaks.

• Lead. As the venture funds, you build the engineering organization — hiring, standards, technical culture, and the operating rhythm the team inherits. The engineers you bring in will be joining the company you shaped, and the first three hires will define what follows.

• Represent. You are the technical voice of the company in investor diligence, buyer and CISO conversations, partnership discussions, and public technical communication. You will work alongside the founding team on positioning and go-to-market, not adjacent to it. Technical credibility is a fundraising asset, and it is yours to carry.

• Own the direction. Where the venture package makes an architectural assumption you disagree with, you overrule it. Founder authority is real or it is not worth the title.

• On intensity: the first twelve to eighteen months are consuming. You will be building, selling, hiring, and deploying at the same time, with incomplete information and no infrastructure beneath you. This is not compatible with a full-time job, a consulting practice, or another venture. We are looking for one person who is prepared to make this the thing they do.

What we are looking for

• Production infrastructure experience at scale — distributed systems, data pipelines, storage, or platform engineering — with operational ownership of systems you designed.

• A zero-to-one record: first versions built without a team, a budget, or settled requirements, and the judgment to know which shortcuts compound into a rewrite.

• Commercial instinct. Infrastructure carries the hardest adoption curve in software, because you are asking teams to trust you with something load-bearing. The first design partners are harder to win than the product is to build, and you will be in those rooms.

• We do not require a graduate degree or a prior exit. We care about what you have shipped and what it survived.

Compensation and structure

• This is a founding equity partnership between you and NeedTech Labs, not employment. Material equity, standard vesting with a cliff and acceleration provisions, and founder-level participation in subsequent rounds.

• There is no salary at pre-seed. Cash compensation is instated at institutional close, and we will not commit to a date we cannot control. Assess your runway honestly before applying.

• NeedTech Labs is a venture creation platform. We contribute the venture package, strategy and go-to-market work, and ongoing partnership through the build. We do not provide capital.