Co-Founder & CTO | AI Infrastructure for Legal Insurance

About the job 🌟 About You Are you a systems builder who gets excited about owning the entire technical foundation of an AI company from day one? Do you want to architect infrastructure that legal insurers trust with their most sensitive data and highest-volume workflows? Are you the kind of engineer who ships production systems, sets the bar for the team, and cares as much about customers as about code? If so, we should talk. 🚀 About INC INC (Iudex Non Calculat) is a pre-seed AI startup based in Zurich, building cognitive infrastructure that automates coverage checks and case handling for legal insurance companies. Legal insurance is a €16.8B European market serving 150M+ policyholders — and every single case still requires 15–45 minutes of manual review by a human claims handler. We compress that to under 2 minutes. We already have a paid pilot with a Swiss legal insurer, a working prototype in production testing, active conversations with several major DACH insurers, and two co-founders: a technical CEO (MSc Applied Math, ETH Zurich; previously built an AI legal tech product with 120+ B2B customers) and a commercial co-founder with deep DACH insurance and enterprise BD experience. What we need now is a third co-founder who owns engineering and infrastructure end-to-end. Our long-term vision: make legal insurance affordable for everyone in the world. Our near-term path there: become the trusted cognitive infrastructure layer for European legal insurers. 🛠️ Your Role You will own everything technical. This is not a senior engineer hire — it is a co-founder role with equal equity, full ownership of engineering and infrastructure, and a seat at every strategic decision. Architecture & Infrastructure: Design and own the system architecture as we scale from single-customer prototype to multi-insurer production platform. Multicloud deployments, per-insurer data isolation, and infrastructure-grade reliability are on your roadmap. AI Systems: Co-own (with Ari) the LLM agent systems that power coverage analysis — fact extraction, policy cross-referencing, exclusion checking, decision drafting. Push accuracy, latency, and cost in the right directions. Security & Compliance: Own data sovereignty, pseudonymization, audit trails, and compliance architecture (Swiss DSG, DSGVO, EU AI Act). "Trusted infrastructure" is ultimately a technical claim — you make it true. Engineering Culture: Set the bar on code quality, testing, observability, and engineering practices. Build the technical hiring pipeline alongside Ari. Every engineer we hire should raise the bar. Technical Hiring: Co-own recruiting for the engineering team as we grow from 3 to 10+ people. Product & Customers: Talk to insurers regularly. Understand their technical environments, integration requirements, and data constraints firsthand. Great infrastructure is built by people who understand the customer. Company Building: Help shape strategy, culture, and operations as an equal co-founder. We make decisions through written docs, not meetings. We value ownership, speed, and honest disagreement. 📌 What We're Looking For ✅ Must-haves Strong systems engineering and applied AI background. You've built and shipped production systems that handle real data at meaningful scale. Track record of technical leadership at the right level — ex-staff/principal engineer at a top company, or ex-CTO/founding engineer of a B2B AI or infrastructure startup. Product taste. You build things that work for users, not just things that are technically interesting. High agency: you identify what matters and go do it without waiting for instructions. Comfort with ambiguity and early-stage chaos. You've either built something before or operated in an environment where nothing was figured out yet. Based in or willing to relocate to Zurich / Western Europe. On-site collaboration matters at this stage. Fluent in English. German is a strong plus. 🎯 Strong signals Experience with regulated industries (insurance, finance, health, government) where data sovereignty, compliance, and auditability are non-negotiable. Depth in LLM systems, retrieval, evaluation pipelines, or agentic workflows in production. Experience with multicloud or multi-tenant infrastructure for enterprise customers. Missionary mindset: you want to build something enduring, not optimize for the next exit. Previous founder experience or very early employee at a startup. 🤝 What We Offer Equal equity split (~33/33/33), vested over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. You are a co-founder, not an employee. Two co-founders already in place. Ari (technical CEO, ETH Math/ML, built previous AI legal tech to 120+ customers) and Simon (Commercial, deep DACH insurance BD, ex-UNIQA/Baloise/Swisscom). You won't be guessing whether there's a product or a market — both already exist. A massive, concentrated market with clear buyers. ~25 large legal insurers control 80%+ of premiums in DACH alone. The technical surface area is growing fast: multicloud, sensitive data, insurer-specific logic, compliance constraints. Autonomy and ownership. We operate with high trust, direct feedback, and written decision-making. No politics, no micromanagement. A mission that scales. We start by building infrastructure insurers trust. We end by making legal protection accessible to billions of people worldwide. 🔍 Our Process We take this search extremely seriously and it’s optional for us to fill it. Expect a multi-round process including deep technical and values conversations with all founders, a working trial on a real INC problem, and reference checks. We'd rather keep the seat open for a year than fill it with the wrong person. Tell us about a system you built that you're proud of, and why building trusted AI infrastructure for insurers excites you. Apply today by pressing the Apply button.