Founding Engineering Lead

About the Role

Lead engineering for an early-stage SaaS team building applied AI products for enterprise software. You will partner with the technical leadership team on architecture, product direction, and machine learning strategy while leading a small engineering pod and remaining hands-on with critical work.

What You'll Do

• Build and lead a pod of three to four engineers, supporting their growth, performance, and hiring while shipping key work yourself.

• Own platform architecture and make build-versus-buy and infrastructure decisions with product and revenue impact.

• Set engineering standards for AI-assisted development, including review criteria, definition of done, release cadence, and on-call practices.

• Lead technical designs and initial implementations for new initiatives.

• Evaluate applied ML research and determine which techniques are suitable for production systems.

• Partner with technical leadership to shape the product roadmap, model strategy, and ML approach.

• Initially spend most of your time building, with the balance focused on team leadership.

What We're Looking For

• Typically 5 to 8 years of engineering experience, with 4 to 5 years considered for exceptional candidates.

• Experience training and deploying machine learning models in production, beyond integrating LLM APIs.

• End-to-end ownership of technical architecture, infrastructure decisions, and build-versus-buy tradeoffs.

• Experience setting engineering standards and leading or managing engineers while continuing to code.

• Strong applied ML judgment across classical methods and newer approaches, including transformers and agent applications.

• Recent experience personally shipping production software, comfort with ambiguity and inherited code, and effective use of AI coding agents.

Compensation & Benefits

Annual salary range: $200,000 to $400,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in New York City, United States.