The Role
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
SPLVRGE is looking for a technical co-founder and CTO to help build what we believe the next generation of luxury hospitality should look like.
We are not looking for someone to maintain our website, manage outside developers, or bolt an AI chatbot onto an existing travel business.
We are looking for a builder.
Someone with deep full-stack engineering experience who can personally architect, prototype and ship products; who has exceptional instincts around consumer UX; who understands the rapidly evolving AI landscape; and who wants to rethink the technology behind luxury vacation rentals from the ground up.
SPLVRGE is already operating in the luxury villa market with a live platform, hundreds of properties and established relationships across the Caribbean villa ecosystem.
But our ambition is considerably larger than building another villa brokerage.
We believe the next generation of luxury hospitality will combine the judgment, trust and destination expertise of exceptional travel professionals with technology capable of understanding a guest, anticipating what they need and orchestrating increasingly complex parts of their trip.
We want SPLVRGE to build that company.
And we’re looking for the technical co-founder who wants to build it with us.
What We’re Building
Luxury vacation rentals currently sit between two imperfect models.
At one end are massive marketplaces offering extraordinary selection and technology but inconsistent service, curation and expertise.
At the other are traditional luxury villa companies offering exceptional human service but often relying on fragmented technology, manual processes and decades-old workflows.
We believe there is a third model:
A technology company with the soul of a great hospitality company.
SPLVRGE is building an AI-native luxury travel platform where technology and human expertise work together throughout the entire guest lifecycle:
Inspiration → Discovery → Recommendation → Inquiry → Conversion → Trip Planning → Stay → Retention → Next Trip
The objective isn’t to remove humans from luxury hospitality.
It’s to make exceptional humans dramatically more capable while making the guest experience simpler, faster and more personal.
What You’ll Build
As Co-founder & CTO, you will own the technical and product evolution of SPLVRGE.
Initially, that means being deeply hands-on.
You should be equally comfortable discussing the architecture of our future platform and opening your laptop and building the first version of it.
Reimagine Luxury Travel Discovery
Traditional villa search still asks travelers to choose a destination, dates, bedrooms and amenities and then sort through dozens of properties.
We think the future looks very different.
A guest should be able to tell SPLVRGE:
“We’re taking our parents somewhere in the Caribbean for their 40th anniversary. Eight adults, four kids. We want beachfront, but don’t want a resort. Great food matters. We’d like a chef a few nights and don’t want anywhere that feels overly developed.”
SPLVRGE should understand the trip, not simply the filters.
You’ll help build the recommendation, conversational and data systems that make that possible.
Build an Intelligent Conversion Engine
We want SPLVRGE to become exceptionally good at turning travel intent into qualified opportunities.
You’ll rethink lead generation and conversion through intelligent lead capture, conversational qualification, behavioral signals, personalized experiences, automated follow-up, CRM intelligence, recommendation systems and AI-assisted sales workflows.
The goal isn’t simply generating more leads.
It’s understanding the traveler well enough to serve them exceptionally—and giving our human experts the intelligence necessary to convert them.
Create Hospitality Intelligence
A luxury villa booking shouldn’t be the end of a transaction. It should be the beginning of a relationship.
Before the trip, SPLVRGE should understand who’s traveling, why they’re traveling, what they’ve considered and what matters to them.
After booking, that knowledge should inform everything from airport transfers and private chefs to restaurants, boats, childcare and celebrations.
During the stay, guests should be able to interact naturally with SPLVRGE while AI handles appropriate requests, assists our concierge team with more complex ones and recognizes when human judgment is required.
And after the stay, we shouldn’t forget everything we learned.
SPLVRGE should know:
They loved St. Barts.
They prefer contemporary architecture.
They travel every February.
They hated being 25 minutes from town.
They loved having a chef.
Their anniversary is approaching.
That knowledge should make every subsequent interaction dramatically better.
Over time, we want to build something far more valuable than a traditional CRM:
a hospitality intelligence layer.
AI at SPLVRGE
We are not interested in AI theater.
Adding a chatbot to a booking website does not make a company AI-first.
We’re interested in where artificial intelligence fundamentally changes the experience and economics of luxury travel—from natural-language discovery and property recommendations to sales copilots, concierge workflows, personalization, destination intelligence, lifecycle marketing and agentic systems capable of completing defined hospitality tasks.
You should understand modern LLM application architecture, retrieval and knowledge systems, agentic workflows, recommendation and personalization systems, data pipelines and model evaluation.
More importantly, you should have strong judgment about what should actually be built.
You’ll determine which technologies deserve to become proprietary SPLVRGE infrastructure, which should leverage outside platforms and models, and which are simply distractions wearing an AI nametag.
Build the Platform Beneath the Experience
Luxury vacation rentals operate on deeply fragmented infrastructure.
Property managers and villa companies use different PMS platforms with inconsistent APIs, inventory structures, calendars, rates, taxes, fees and policies.
Solving that fragmentation is part of the opportunity.
You’ll architect a platform capable of ingesting and normalizing data from multiple partners and systems into a clean internal model.
The long-term objective is important:
SPLVRGE’s customer experience should not be constrained by whichever software our suppliers happen to use.
You’ll also lead the evolution of SPLVRGE’s consumer experience—from information architecture, search and property pages to conversational discovery, inquiry, booking, trip management and concierge experiences.
You should care deeply about design.
A $40,000 villa shouldn’t be sold through an experience that feels like enterprise software.
Who You Are
There is no perfect résumé for this position, but the strongest candidate will likely have several of these characteristics:
- Deep full-stack engineering experience. You have designed and shipped real production systems and can operate across frontend, backend, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure and application architecture.
- You still build. This matters. We’re not looking for someone whose only remaining technical skill is running engineering meetings.
- AI-native product experience. You’ve meaningfully built with modern AI infrastructure and understand both its extraordinary capabilities and its very real limitations.
- Exceptional consumer-product instincts. You understand UX, search, conversion, personalization, experimentation, analytics and performance.
- Travel, hospitality or marketplace experience. Experience in luxury vacation rentals, STR, online travel, hospitality technology, marketplaces, PMS/distribution or luxury consumer products is strongly preferred.
- Commercial awareness. You understand that engineering decisions, customer experience and business outcomes are often the same conversation.
- Founder mentality. You’re comfortable operating with incomplete information, moving quickly and taking extreme ownership.
- Fundraising experience. Ideally, you’ve participated in institutional venture fundraising and can help articulate SPLVRGE’s technology, AI, data and defensibility story to sophisticated investors.
Founder, Not Employee
This distinction matters.
We’re not recruiting someone to execute a predetermined technology roadmap.
You’ll help determine the roadmap.
You should challenge assumptions about SPLVRGE’s product, technology and even its business model.
You should see opportunities we don’t.
You should be thinking about what happens when AI agents begin researching and booking travel for consumers.
What happens when travel search becomes conversational.
What proprietary data SPLVRGE needs to accumulate today to create defensibility five years from now.
How the traditional travel advisor, OTA, villa broker, concierge and property-management technology stack may begin to converge.
And occasionally, you should tell the CEO his idea is terrible.
That’s part of the job.
Ownership
This is a true co-founder role, not a traditional executive hire.
We are looking for someone who wants to build SPLVRGE alongside the founder and have meaningful ownership in the company and its long-term outcome. This is an equity-based role at our current pre-revenue stage, with the equity package reflecting the level of responsibility, commitment and risk expected of a true co-founder.
We expect this person to think and operate as an owner from day one. In return, they will participate meaningfully in SPLVRGE’s success as one.
There is no base salary at this stage. Future cash compensation will be established as the company reaches appropriate revenue and/or financing milestones.
Why SPLVRGE
Luxury travelers have already demonstrated their willingness to spend extraordinary amounts of money on exceptional private homes.
What hasn’t been fully solved is the technology surrounding those stays.
Search remains primitive.
Inventory is fragmented.
Guest knowledge disappears between systems.
Sales is heavily manual.
Concierge is difficult to scale.
Retention is underdeveloped.
And much of the industry’s technology was architected before the current generation of artificial intelligence existed.
That creates an unusual opportunity.
SPLVRGE brings deep luxury villa industry experience, supplier relationships, destination knowledge, an existing portfolio and a live platform.
Now we need the technical founder capable of turning those assets into something much larger.
The Person We’re Hoping Exists
Maybe you spent several years building marketplace infrastructure at a major travel company.
Maybe you were an early engineer at a hospitality startup.
Maybe you built systems behind vacation rentals, hotels, marketplaces or luxury commerce.
Maybe you’ve become obsessed with what AI will do to travel over the next decade.
And maybe you’re at the point where you don’t want to optimize another company’s product anymore.
You want ownership.
You want to build.
You want the technical decisions you make today to determine what a company looks like ten years from now.
If that’s you, we should talk.
SPLVRGE
Vacation Bigger.
