Founding Engineering Lead

This is a founding-level engineering role at an early-stage B2B SaaS company operating in the customer success and product analytics space. You will serve as the technical backbone of the engineering org splitting your time roughly 75% hands-on IC work and 25% technical leadership with a clear path to Head of Engineering or VP of Engineering as the team scales.

• Ship product enhancements end-to-end moving the platform from founder-led delivery to a scalable self-serve motion.
• Own technical architecture decisions and re-architect existing systems in close partnership with the CTO.
• Build and leverage AI agent-driven development workflows and custom tooling to maximize engineering velocity.
• Lead a pod of 2-3 engineers providing technical mentorship sprint scoping and eventual people management.
• Shape the ML and product roadmap including longer-term plans around custom model training and agentic pipelines.

• 5 years of engineering experience with no more than roughly 3 years in pure management roles must be actively shipping code today.
• At least 3 years as a founding engineer tech lead or staff-level IC at a high-bar startup owning core product features or equivalent core product ownership at a major technology company.
• Deeply AI-native: builds with AI agents daily including custom development workflows and multi-agent orchestration (not just off-the-shelf copilot usage).
• Full-stack capable across React Python and with a clear lean toward backend depth.
• Demonstrated experience shipping a product end-to-end with minimal oversight.
• Strong applied ML fundamentals: classical algorithms validation design and informed opinions on LLMs and transformer architectures.
• Experience at an applied AI or AI-native company building data-heavy analytics or recommendation products is a strong plus.
• Strong academic foundation in computer science mathematics statistics or machine learning from a competitive university program; graduate-level ML or statistics coursework or research is a plus.
• Familiarity with GCP is a plus.

Base salary: $250000 to $350000 USD annually. Equity offered. Visa sponsorship is not available.

On-site full-time in New York City New York United States. Candidates must be based in NYC or willing to relocate.