This is senior technical leadership focused on backend architecture, distributed systems, and scalability, for someone who has spent years building and owning large-scale backend platforms in high-growth environments. It is not an infrastructure, DevOps, data engineering, or AI research seat. AI is a feature of the systems you will build, not the center of your career. The CTO evaluates for system design from first principles, sound long-term architecture decisions, how systems behave under growth, and real ownership.