San Francisco, CA · On-site (5 days/week) · Full-time
Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity
The Role
Run the company's engineering — leading the core platform team and the teams that deliver client implementations — and own the technical direction as the company scales from 1:1 to 1:many. This role stays hands-on enough to make the hard calls and has a direct path to CTO.
What you'll be doing
- Lead the core platform team and multiple client-implementation teams, owning the seam between the platform and the implementations, and partner with product owners to run several engagements at once
- Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers and future leads; set code review and reliability standards; build an org that scales from 5 to 50
- Set the architecture and technical bar across the platform and every implementation, make build-vs-buy calls, and translate developments in agent frameworks, tool use, and long-context reasoning into production
- Guide teams building compound agent systems — multi-step orchestration, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation suites, and confidence-gated human-in-the-loop — inside enterprise ERP and CRM software
- Own the multi-client fleet and infrastructure: per-client configuration and isolation across shared-cloud, dedicated, VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped deployments; fleet-wide upgrade and rollback; monitoring, alerting, on-call; plus Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, and Azure
Tech stack: AI agent frameworks (orchestration, tool use, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, human-in-the-loop); multi-tenant backend systems; enterprise integration (APIs, OAuth, connectors, ERP/CRM); Kubernetes; infrastructure-as-code; multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, Azure.
Requirements
- Top AI lab or founding eng at AI startup pedigree
- Production AI/ML systems: inference, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring
- 6+ years engineering with 2+ years staff, principal, or founding
- High agency, ownership mentality
- SF Financial District, 5 days in-person
Green Flags
- Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup, comfortable with founding-team scope rather than a single feature inside a larger org
- Track record of taking full ownership of outcomes across a system, not just their own code
- High agency, moves without waiting for requirements documents or explicit permission
- Comfortable talking directly to business decision-makers such as CFOs, COOs, and ops leads rather than working through layers of product management
- Evaluation and reliability discipline, building eval suites, confidence thresholds, and fail-closed behavior rather than shipping demos
Red Flags