Careera.ai: an AI product built from zero as co-founder CTO
CTO of an AI recruitment platform from blank page to shipped product: owned the architecture, the AI matching engine, the employer and job-seeker applications, and the engineering team that built them. Co-founded the company at the same time. Recognised in the Echelon X Top 100 APAC 2024.
- Client
- Careera.ai
- Industry
- HR technology, AI recruitment
- Region
- Singapore
- Engagement
- 2022 to 2024
The challenge
Hiring is full of signal that never reaches a decision, and full of bias that does. Careera set out to fix both at once: assess candidates on merit, match them to roles with something better than keyword search, and refuse to collect the data that lets prejudice in. Starting from nothing meant every one of those had to become an architectural decision before it could become a feature.
What we did
Held the CTO role from zero to launch, as one of the two co-founders. The technical remit was the whole stack: platform architecture, the AI matching engine, gamified interactive assessments, the employer and job-seeker applications, the data model, and hiring and running the engineering team. DEI was an architectural decision rather than a feature: the platform deliberately does not collect the data that would let bias into a ranking.
Outcome
A live AI recruitment platform on web, iOS and Android, operating under PDPA and GDPR, recognised as an Echelon X Top 100 APAC company in 2024. That experience carried into A2Z Web’s AI Automation and AI Digital Employees practice and into our own SaaS products.
The venture
Careera.ai (careera.ai) is an AI-driven recruitment platform based in Singapore, positioned as the unbiased way to hire and get hired. It was founded in 2022 by Erik Ingvoldstad as CEO and Dawid Makowski as CTO, who owned the technology end to end.
The product profiles candidates through proprietary merit-based assessment rather than CV keyword matching, runs gamified interactive assessments, and matches candidates to roles with AI that ranks on skills, experience and potential.
It was recognised as an Echelon X Top 100 APAC company in 2024.
Bias is an architecture problem
The platform deliberately does not collect the data that would let prejudice into a ranking. That is a decision you can only make at the start, because retrofitting it means throwing away the schema and the model inputs.
The same applies to the assessment design. An assessment nobody completes produces no signal, so the interactive assessments were built to be finished, which is a product and engineering problem before it is an HR one.
The CTO remit
Co-founder on paper, CTO in practice: every technical decision from the first schema to the launched apps sat with this role.
- Platform architecture for a two-sided marketplace where both sides have entirely different jobs to do.
- The AI matching engine, ranking candidates against roles on merit signals.
- Gamified interactive assessments, designed for completion rates as much as for measurement quality.
- Employer and job-seeker applications, shipped on web, iOS and Android.
- The engineering team, hired, structured and run.
- Compliance posture under PDPA and GDPR, which for a platform handling candidate data is a design constraint rather than a legal afterthought.
There was no separate architect, no agency and no fractional stand-in to hand the hard calls to. Build or buy, what to model, what to defer and what the platform would refuse to collect were all decided in the role.
Where that experience went
The work fed directly into our AI Automation and AI Digital Employees practice, and into our own SaaS products: SharpAPI for AI workflow APIs, CVMatchScore for resume-to-role scoring, and BrandGEO for AI brand visibility auditing.
I’ve worked with Dawid over several years as co-founders. The most important thing I can say about him is that he’s one of the most trustworthy people I’ve ever met. When you ask his opinion, he’ll tell you and do what’s right, not just take the easy way out. He’s also exceptionally technically capable, and frankly just a pleasure to work with.
Erik Ingvoldstad
Founder @ Acoustic.group; co-founder, Careera
January 9, 2025
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