Founding Engineering Lead

About the Opportunity

An early-stage, venture-backed AI company is seeking a Founding Engineering Lead to help build an enterprise platform that turns customer data into actionable revenue insights. The platform combines LLMs, applied machine learning, and structured data to help businesses prioritize accounts, identify growth opportunities, and improve post-sales execution.

This is a founding-level opportunity for an experienced engineer who enjoys building products, making architecture decisions, and leading a small team. You will work directly with the CTO and CEO, with a clear path toward Head of Engineering or VP of Engineering as the company grows.

The Role

You will spend approximately 75% of your time on hands-on engineering and 25% on technical leadership. You will focus on shipping product improvements, evolving the architecture, and moving the platform from early customer delivery to a scalable, self-serve experience.

You will also lead and mentor two to three engineers while helping shape the product roadmap and longer-term AI and ML strategy.

What You Will Do

• Own product development from requirements and architecture through implementation, deployment, and iteration.
• Build reliable backend services, data pipelines, and intuitive frontend experiences.
• Evaluate existing systems and lead architectural improvements alongside the CTO.
• Develop custom AI coding workflows, agent orchestration, and development tooling that improve engineering speed and quality.
• Build and improve production AI and ML capabilities, including scoring, segmentation, and agentic workflows.
• Lead technical planning, scope work, review code, and mentor engineers.
• Partner with the founders to translate customer needs into product and technical priorities.
• Establish practical standards for testing, evaluation, observability, and maintainability.

What We Are Looking For

• Typically 5–12 years of engineering experience, with recent, substantial hands-on coding responsibility.
• Experience as a founding engineer, technical lead, Staff engineer, or hands-on engineering manager.
• Demonstrated success shipping products end to end with minimal oversight.
• Proven experience leading engineers, making technical decisions, and taking responsibility for delivery.
• Strong backend engineering skills in Python and/or Node.js, with the ability to build across React or Next.js frontend applications.
• Deep experience using AI coding agents in daily development, including custom workflows, development harnesses, or multi-agent orchestration.
• Strong applied ML fundamentals, including classical algorithms, experimentation, validation design, and data science workflows.
• Working knowledge of LLMs and transformer architectures, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and informed views on emerging research.
• A bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, mathematics, statistics, machine learning, or a related quantitative field from a leading university.
• Willingness to work onsite in New York City five days per week.

Preferred Experience

• Building applied AI, analytics, recommendation, or other data-intensive products.
• Early-stage startup experience with broad architecture and product ownership.
• Production ML deployment, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Graduate-level coursework or research in machine learning or statistics.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform.

Why Join

• Meaningful ownership over architecture, product development, and AI strategy.
• Direct collaboration with the founders and a small engineering team.
• A venture-backed business with early enterprise customer traction.
• Competitive base compensation and significant equity.
• A path to senior engineering leadership while remaining close to the product and code.