Founding Engineering Lead (Applied AI Startup)

An early-stage applied AI company with initial traction is hiring its first engineering lead to serve as the technical anchor of the team, working alongside the CTO. Most of the job is hands-on building, with a smaller portion devoted to guiding a few engineers, and there is a defined route toward heading up engineering as the company grows.

Leadership and delivery

• Deliver product upgrades end to end so the company can stop relying on founders to deliver and instead offer a scalable self-service product
• Make architecture decisions and rework existing systems together with the CTO
• Work with the best AI agents and craft bespoke tooling around them to speed up engineering
• Guide a compact pod of two to three engineers, starting with technical mentoring and sprint planning and later taking on management duties
• Help shape the product and ML direction, with longer-range work on training bespoke models and agent-based pipelines

Background we want

• Five or more years in engineering, of which at most roughly three were spent purely managing people, and actively writing code now
• A thoroughly AI-first way of working, with bespoke agent-based dev workflows and orchestration of several agents, plus the ability to explain your setup in detail
• Solid grounding in applied machine learning, covering classical algorithms and data science workflows, plus a point of view on how large language models and transformers are trained
• Full-stack ability with React, Next.js, Python and Node.js, with extra strength on the backend
• A record of shipping data-heavy or applied AI products end to end with little oversight

In the office full time in New York, NY. Visa transfers and new sponsorship are both possible.