Field CTO – Retail & Commerce AI

The role

The Field CTO for Retail & Commerce AI is a senior technical leadership role responsible for converting raw market demand into a scalable, domain-specific platform. You will own the technical product strategy and the technical GTM motion, ensuring Nebius evolves its capabilities to support the unique demands of Retail & Commerce AI workloads.

Operating at the intersection of deep customer engagement, platform engineering, and sales strategy, you will serve as the principal technical partner for Lighthouse Accounts, engaging directly with customer CTOs to map Nebius’ existing capabilities to their immediate needs to help close complex deals. Simultaneously, you will not only identify customer challenges but also architect the solution patterns that solve them for the entire market.

This is a definitive "Zero to One" opportunity to define a new category of cloud infrastructure from the ground up.

You’re welcome to work in our office in London or remotely.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Executive Technical Leadership: Serve as the external "CTO" face of Nebius to Retail & Commerce AI customers, partners, and ecosystem stakeholders, building trust with executive peers
• Lighthouse Deal Support: Partner with Sales leadership to close strategic "company-making" deals by leading architectural workshops and aligning technical roadmaps with customer goals
• Technical Product Strategy: Translate bespoke customer needs into clear, scalable technical and product requirements for Nebius product, engineering, and infrastructure teams
• Field Enablement: Act as a force multiplier for the sales organization by creating the technical narrative, reference architectures, and training materials needed to upskill Field SAs and Sellers
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Drive alignment across Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, and GTM teams, ensuring the internal roadmap reflects the reality of the market
• Architectural Guidance: Provide architectural guidance to help customers maximize value from Nebius services, while identifying the necessary "primitives" required to support end-to-end agentic workflows
• Pattern Recognition: Identify recurring customer pain points across agentic commerce, retail process optimization, and data pipelines to surface gaps in existing offerings and influence roadmap decisions
• Ecosystem & M&A: Partner with ecosystem vendors (agentic commerce platforms, product discovery & recommendation engines, price & promotion optimization, POS systems & payment solutions, supply chain management) to identify integration opportunities and evaluate potential technical M&A targets
• Feedback Loops: Maintain structured internal feedback loops to ensure customer learnings are tracked, communicated, and acted upon by R&D

We expect you to have:

• 5+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or distributed systems
• 5+ years of experience in AI, Data Science, ML, MLOps and Complex Integrations, with exposure to production or large-scale systems
• Prior experience in a senior technical leadership role (e.g., CTO / Technical co-founder in Retail AI-Native startup, Field CTO, Head of Machine Learning, Head of Engineering)
• Dual-Competency: You are equally comfortable drawing a distributed system architecture on a whiteboard for engineers and explaining the business value of that architecture to a CEO
• GTM Fluency: Experience partnering with Sales teams to close large-scale enterprise deals and enabling field teams with technical assets
• Product-Minded Leadership: Experience defining a product or platform strategy based on market feedback, not just executing technical tickets
• Technical Depth: Strong hands-on understanding of GPU-centric infrastructure, high-performance compute, storage systems, and networking
• Retail Fluency: Experience with Retail & Commerce AI workflows, including agentic commerce, omnichannel Gen AI, product discovery & recommendation, supply chain optimization, training pipelines, and real-world deployment constraints
• Communication: Strong executive presence, capable of influencing product teams and leadership through clarity and credibility
• Comfort in Ambiguity: Experience operating in fast-moving environments (hyperscalers, cloud platforms, or advanced AI startups) where requirements are evolving
• Travel: ~20–30% (customer visits, partner engagements, industry events)

Why Nebius

• Build Solutions: You aren't just selling infrastructure; you are shaping the cloud architecture that will power the next generation of Retail & Commerce AI
• Scale: Opportunity build a world class, multi-billion dollar business from scratch
• Frontier Technology: Work at the frontier of AI, agentic workflows, and commerce intelligence alongside leading customers and partners
• Strategic Impact: Operate with real influence over product direction, platform strategy, and ecosystem development
• Ownership: Join a team that values technical depth, ownership, and speed of execution
• Mission: Help define how intelligence moves from the data center to digitalcommerce, retail stores and supply chain