Chief Technology Officer at Index Industries
Chicago, IL
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Jul 20, 2026
Chicago, IL
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A founding CTO role at an early-stage stealth startup building a predictive U.S. home price index and a related on-chain token backed by residential real estate, with DeFi integrations including yield tokenization and liquidity protocols. The position covers end-to-end technical ownership — architecture, smart contracts, infrastructure, and security — alongside hiring and leading the engineering team and working closely with founders on product and investor engagement. Suited to a senior engineer-leader with startup experience who can both write code and make high-stakes architectural decisions.
Principal level · 8+ years · National · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $178,991 (middle half $141,096–$225,584).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
This is a founding CTO role at a stealth-mode startup; the posting is explicitly a people-management and technical leadership position (hiring, architecture ownership, investor relations), which drives the 11-3021 classification. However, the JD also emphasizes hands-on coding ability ('can code when needed', 'co-builder, not just a manager'), making 15-1252 a genuine runner-up.
Location is not stated anywhere in the posting. The company (Index Industries) appears US-based given the US home price index product focus, but no city, state, or remote policy is specified.
The role is advertised as CTO/co-founder level, which maps to Principal — this is an org-wide, top-of-ladder technical authority role, not merely a Senior or Staff engineer.
The requirements list three deep-expertise domains as alternatives ('at least one of'): fintech infrastructure, blockchain/smart contract development (Solidity, Rust/Anchor), or security-first distributed systems. These are framed as interchangeable gates rather than separate hard requirements; Solidity and Rust are captured as alternatives of each other to reflect this.
Pendle, Aave/Morpho, and Uniswap/Curve appear in the product description narrative (stack context), not in a requirements section — marked as preferred accordingly.
DeFi protocol design, tokenomics, and on-chain infrastructure are explicitly listed under 'Bonus' — marked as preferred.
SOC 2 is called out under the hard requirements block ('Oversee security, compliance infrastructure, and regulatory readiness (SOC 2, etc.)') and is treated as a required area of ownership.
Compensation is described only as 'Competitive base + significant equity' with no figures provided; no comp fields can be populated.
Co-founder consideration is mentioned as available for the right candidate — this is an unusually senior and equity-heavy founding role.
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