Founding Engineering Lead

About the Role

Lead hands-on engineering and applied machine learning at an early-stage B2B SaaS company. You will shape the platform architecture and technical roadmap with the founders while leading a small engineering pod.

What You'll Do

• Build and lead a pod of engineers, supporting their growth, performance, and hiring while shipping critical work yourself.
• Own platform architecture and make build-versus-buy and infrastructure decisions.
• Set engineering standards, code review criteria, release practices, definitions of done, and on-call policies.
• Lead technical design and initial implementation of new initiatives.
• Assess applied machine learning research and determine what is suitable for production systems.
• Partner with the CTO on product direction, model strategy, and machine learning approaches.

What We're Looking For

• Typically 5 to 8 years of engineering experience, with exceptional candidates considered from 4 to 5 years.
• Experience in an AI-native company, with technical leadership or ownership that helped build and support an engineering team.
• Hands-on experience training and deploying machine learning models in commercial production products, beyond integrating language model APIs.
• End-to-end ownership of technical architecture, infrastructure decisions, and engineering standards.
• Recent experience personally shipping production software, plus a record of stable engineering tenure.
• Strong applied machine learning judgment, including classical methods and current approaches to transformers and agent applications.
• Comfort with ambiguity, inherited code, hands-on development, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.