Semiotic.AI is advancing the frontier of decentralized systems by designing and implementing foundational infrastructure for cryptographically-secure and autonomous agent interaction. Having contributed significantly to protocol R&D in the Graph ecosystem, we are now initiating a novel micropayments solution that enables financial AI-to-AI and AI-to-Service interactions, with minimal latency and high scalability.
This new protocol will serve as a payment substrate for autonomous agents, enabling granular, per-interaction value exchange across services, data feeds, and coordination layers. We believe that unlocking frictionless micro-transactions between intelligent agents is a prerequisite for the next evolution of economic coordination, and we're assembling the team who is going to make it happen.
We're seeking a technically seasoned, strategically-minded CTO to lead this endeavour, someone who can bridge the rigour of systems architecture with the flexibility and pace of early-stage product development. Think: agents paying to query a subgraph, trigger a smart contract, or use compute. Think: embedded wallets, real-time payments and cryptographic receipts, all abstracted away in an invisible, seamless UX.
The Mission.As the CTO of this initiative, you will design and steward the technical foundation for a machine-native payments layer. You'll architect systems, define standards, mentor contributors, and ensure that every engineering decision aligns with our broader strategic direction. That of enabling trust-minimized, low-cost, composable agent-to-agent commerce in both Web3 and Web2 environments. This is a deeply cross-disciplinary challenge, requiring fluency in Distributed Systems, On-Chain Logic, Cryptographic design, protocol scalability, and payments architecture.
Your Areas of PlayTechnical Architecture & Protocol Design- Define the system-level architecture for agent-centric payments, including state channels, settlement layer, agent identity and reputation, wallet layers, plus on/off-ramping solutions.
- Translate cryptographic and academic research into secure, performant, and modular protocol components.
- Standardize a framework for agent-to-agent and agent-to-service payments, supporting high throughput, privacy, and cost-efficiency.
- Lead or advise in the implementation of PoC agents, which can include DeFi data consumers and service access agents.
- Define payment flow primitives that support machine coordination, access control, and service gating across decentralized infrastructure.
Strategic Leadership & Roadmapping- Define and own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for the micropayments protocol.
- Co-develop the technical roadmap with the CEO, Head of Research and Cryptography team.
- Define and prioritize development phases: from concept, prototype, MVP and final product.
- Balance rapid product iterations with long-term scalability and integration viability.
- Translate research and early-stage concepts into working protocols, interfaces, and dev infrastructure.
- Partner with the CEO and Research team to synthesize market opportunity, technical constraints, and user needs into a coherent product vision.
Team Leadership & Engineering Culture- Serve as an internal thought leader and external evangelist.
- Establish robust processes for code quality, dev tooling, review, and testing.
- Shape the technical team structure; hire, mentor, and align contributors with clearly defined technical goals.
- Define and uphold standards for quality, velocity, and engineering excellence, fostering a strong culture of technical ownership, experimentation, and delivery.
Ecosystem & Fundraising Support- Represent Semiotic.AI in research circles, dev conferences, and protocol working groups.
- Support fundraising through technical diligence, roadmap presentation, and investor communication.
- Coordinate conversations with integration partners, infra providers, and agent protocol developers.
- Become the Subject Matter Expert on product Architecture.
- 7+ years of experience building distributed systems, ideally with a focus on scalability, protocol engineering, or financial infrastructure.
- Comfort with bridging the gap between research and implementation, taking ideas from whitepapers to running systems.
- Technical leadership in early-stage environments, preferably within Web3, fintech, or systems infrastructure.
- Strong proficiency in Rust or Go, with working knowledge of smart contract development and on-chain execution, ideally in Solidity.
- Familiarity with agent-based orchestration frameworks, coordination economies, or embedded AI tools.
- Previous experience building payment protocols or protocol abstraction services
- Strong grasp of payment flow architecture, including on-chain/off-chain interactions, cryptographic commitments, state channel design, and wallet infrastructure.
- Clear and rigorous communicator; able to guide architectural decisions, explain tradeoffs, and pitch technical visions across stakeholder groups.
Differentiators- Experience with AI x crypto hybrid systems or agent coordination in real-time data networks.
- Experience with traditional payment systems (e.g. SWIFT, SEPA, ACH, Fedwire, Visa/Mastercard, Stripe, Plaid, Open Banking APIs).
- Familiarity with on-chain payment rails (e.g. Ethereum, L2s like zkSync/Starknet, Solana Pay, Cosmos IBC, LayerZero, Axelar).
- Understanding of EOAs and Account Abstraction developments like EIP-7702.
- Awareness of protocol-level enhancements like the PAY opcode (EIP-5920) for native ETH transfers.
- Experience bridging fiat and crypto flows, including on/off-ramps, stablecoins (USDC, DAI), and compliance layers (KYC, AML).
