Startup CEO

About

Our mission is to raise AGI with the richness of human intelligence - curious, witty, imaginative, and full of unexpected brilliance.

Surge was founded by engineers and researchers who dreamed of building the next generation AI. We're building a platform that powers the most powerful models in the world in partnership with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.

At Surge, we believe the path to AGI isn't just about scaling compute - it's about embracing the unlimited ceiling of human intelligence and creativity in the data that shapes these systems. Our platform combines elite human expertise with cutting-edge tools for scalable oversight, from building rich RL environments to conducting rigorous evaluations that go beyond benchmarks. We've run a profitable business from day one without raising venture funding.

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The Role

As a CEO, you’ll bring strategic judgment, pattern recognition, and organizational insight shaped by real leadership experience. You’ll help design and review complex decision-making datasets that mirror the tradeoffs faced by senior executives - resource allocation, risk management, growth strategy, culture, and crisis response.

The work calls for clarity of thought under constraint. You’ll model how experienced leaders synthesize incomplete information, align stakeholders, and chart decisive paths through uncertainty. Your perspective will help train systems to think not just analytically, but executively - to reason in terms of impact, sequence, and consequence.

What we’re Looking for

• Executive Leadership Experience – Former CEO, President, or equivalent senior executive at a VC-backed or bootstrapped startup (required)
• Strategic Acumen – Track record of navigating complex tradeoffs and setting organizational direction across competing priorities
• Operational Depth – Understanding of how strategy translates into execution, metrics, and accountability systems
• ‍ Communication Mastery – Ability to articulate decisions with clarity, empathy, and narrative coherence for diverse stakeholders

Work You Might Do

• Reviewing and refining strategic reasoning tasks to reflect how experienced executives make tradeoffs in real-world contexts
• Evaluating model-generated recommendations for clarity, realism, and operational soundness
• Contributing decision scenarios - mergers, pivots, org design, crisis management - and assessing reasoning quality
• Partnering with Surge researchers to define benchmarks for executive-level reasoning, prioritization, and judgment under pressure

How to Apply

Please email talent@surgehq.ai with your background and interest in collaborating with Surge. Please include the name of the role you’re applying for in the subject line or email body. We welcome personal projects and writings!

Where you can work

This role is 100% remote: you can work from anywhere in the world.