Chief Technology Officer
Who is Meerkat?
Meerkat, Inc. is an early-stage insurtech company and grant prize winner of Columbia University’s Summer Startup Track, a competitive accelerator program of 60 MBA-founded ventures. Meerkat uses proprietary computer vision models to quickly and comprehensively create inventory of one’s personal belongings, and then uses that information to recommend more personalized and cheaper home and renters insurance policies, similar to how Credit Karma recommends credit cards based on credit scores. Using a few pictures of one’s home, Meerkat’s AI algorithms automatically identify items (e.g., TV, sofa, lamps), generate a cloud-based ledger, and estimate the value of these belongings. We plan to launch our MVP before the end of December 2020 and raise our seed round in Spring 2021.
CTO Role Description
Meerkat is seeking a highly-skilled Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This individual will serve as a founding member of our venture and be compensated with equity. You should be a strategic thinker, an effective communicator, and an expert in technological development. You will act as both a technology and business expert and will work alongside the CEO (Scott Reddy, Columbia Business School MBA ‘21, ex-McKinsey) and COO (Nicholaus Tucker, Columbia Business School MBA ‘21) to make executive decisions that determine both the current and future operations of the company.
CTO Responsibilities
- Mentor and manage more junior engineers; recruit and interview additional engineers
- Architect our back-end infrastructure to ensure support of MVP and computer vision models
- Lead development of our MVP, from design to development to launch to user-testing
- Research and test new methodologies that could improve our computer vision models
- Set a vision for how technology will be used at Meerkat; create and adhere to roadmaps
- Make executive decisions on behalf of the company’s technological requirements
- Ensure technology practices adhere to regulatory standards
CTO Preferred Qualifications
- Pursuing masters degree (or higher) in technical field (e.g., Computer Science, Engineering, etc.)
- 2-3 years professional experience in technical role (managerial experience preferred)
- Exceptional team and project management skills; extremely deadline-driven
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills; ability to explain technological problems to a non-technical audience
- Intellectually curious; willing and excited to learn new concepts or technologies to meet the needs of Meerkat
If you are interested in the CTO role at Meerkat, please send your resume to Scott Reddy at sreddy21@gsb.columbia.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!