Founding Engineering Lead

About the Role

Join an early-stage B2B SaaS team as its hands-on engineering lead, shaping platform architecture and applied machine learning strategy alongside the technical founders. You will lead a small engineering pod while building and shipping critical product work, helping establish the technical foundation and practices for the team.

What You'll Do

• Lead a pod of three to four engineers, supporting their growth, performance, and hiring while remaining hands-on with key projects.

• Own core platform architecture, infrastructure decisions, build-versus-buy choices, and cost considerations.

• Set engineering standards, code review criteria, release practices, definitions of done, and on-call policies.

• Lead technical design and initial implementation for new initiatives.

• Evaluate applied machine learning approaches and distinguish techniques ready for production from those that are still speculative.

• Partner with the technical leadership team on product direction, model strategy, and the engineering roadmap.

What We're Looking For

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

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

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

• Experience setting engineering practices and holding a team accountable as a technical or people lead.

• Recent experience personally shipping software end-to-end, along with strong hands-on coding skills.

• Applied ML judgment across classical methods and newer approaches, plus experience using AI coding agents effectively.

• Comfort working through ambiguity, existing code, and practical delivery challenges.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $200,000 to $400,000 annually, with equity. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in New York City.