Tech Lead/VP of Engineering

ROLE DETAILS

Reports to: Founders

Location: Remote Global / Singapore

Type: Full-time

Experience: 10 to 20 years of engineering management experience building and shipping production systems, with a demonstrated ability to lead technical direction and engineers in a high-paced environment, building AI products in the high velocity of the AI era. We care about what you have built and how you think, not just your credentials alone.

ABOUT FORMAS.AI

FORMAS.AI is an AI-powered design and 3D modelling workspace built specifically for architects, interior designers, and real estate teams, helping them move from early ideas to production-grade visual outputs with greater speed, control, and precision than traditional workflows allow.

Our platform orchestrates multiple frontier AI models across image, video, 3D, spatial ideation, and design workflows. Unlike generic AI tools, Formas is built ground-up for a specific and demanding user in AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) and interior design.

We are a small, agile, and fast-moving team working at the intersection of design, product, and AI. Our culture is collaborative, energetic, and genuinely high velocity. Expect high ownership, a steep learning curve, and direct exposure to how an AI-native startup is built from the inside.

THE ROLE & YOUR IMPACT

Own the technical architecture of the platform. You will lead engineering decisions, set the bar for quality and velocity, and ship code daily. While also making sure the codebase stays clean and scalable.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will write code, mentor/manage other engineers, and make any build-vs-buy calls that shape the product.

You will be building AI products in the high velocity of the AI era, where models, tooling and user expectations shift month to month. We need someone with 10 to 20 years of engineering and management experience who can perform in a high-paced environment, and who has the judgment to move quickly without losing control of the codebase.

THE ATTITUDE WE NEED

This is not a role for someone who waits for a fully specified roadmap, detailed documentation, or perfectly scoped tickets before setting technical direction. Those help, but in a fast-moving AI company they won't always exist.

We need a technical leader who can turn an incomplete brief into a clear architecture and plan, and who thinks like a product person as well as an engineer: understanding what we are trying to achieve for the user and the business.

Quality matters deeply, but it is not perfection, or over-engineering for a scale we have not reached. The role is about judgment: taking care on one-way doors (architecture, security, data, cost), moving quickly on two-way doors, and being clear about the trade-offs.

We expect AI to be embedded in how we build. It should multiply the team's output, while you remain accountable for technical judgment, system design, priorities and the growth of your engineers.

The ideal person is:

• Seasoned and fast. 10 to 20 years of engineering and management experience, leading engineers in a high-paced environment.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to turn it into direction and a plan others can execute.
• Product-minded and commercially aware, connecting technical choices to user value, cost and speed.
• A decisive trade-off maker, quick on reversible decisions, careful on irreversible ones.
• A clear communicator with the founders and the team on progress, risks and options.
• A multiplier for the team who raises the bar and mentors engineers without adding process for its own sake.
• Trusted with governance, able to build the security, compliance and AI governance foundations that customers expect.
• Eager to build AI-native ways of working.

We want a leader who helps us ship faster with judgment: not by lowering the bar, but by making it more intelligent and proportionate.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Architecture Ownership. Own and evolve the platform architecture - a modular backend, a structured frontend architecture, and real-time systems.
• Technical Standards. Set engineering standards for code quality, testing, performance, and security. Lead code reviews.
• Hands-On Delivery. Ship code daily - APIs, frontend features, infrastructure, and AI integrations. This is not a management-only role.
• Backend Systems. Maintain and extend our cloud data, authentication, and real-time data layers. Optimize cloud infrastructure across storage, CDN, and serverless functions.
• Real-Time & Collaboration. Lead the evolution of real-time collaboration features - multi-tab support, room subscriptions, and progress streaming.
• Billing & Payments. Own the billing and payments integration: subscriptions, credit packs, webhooks, and vouchers, ensuring it scales with new pricing models.
• Media Pipelines. Oversee and improve media processing pipelines.
• Testing & Reliability. Drive a pragmatic, risk-based testing culture - regression, contract, smoke, and stress tests where they protect what matters most. Own monitoring and alerting.
• Technical Trade-offs. Make clear calls on build vs buy, tech debt and scope, and give the founders a concise view of risks and options.
• Governance & Trust. Build the governance and trust layer for the platform, and lead us into compliance certification, including ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.
• AI-Native Ways of Working. Embed AI across code generation, review, debugging, test creation and documentation to extend the team's capacity, while staying accountable for judgment and quality.
• Mentorship. Guide and unblock other engineers. Help the team level up technically without slowing down.

SKILLS & TOOLS

You don’t need to check every box. We value builders who move fast with quality - and who bring energy and ambition to everything they ship.

• 10 to 20 years in engineering and engineering management, with Node.js in production and a track record of leading engineers in a high-paced environment.
• AI product experience: You have built and shipped AI-powered products and thrive in the high velocity of the AI era.
• Governance & compliance: You have interest and/or experience taking an organisation through, or been closely involved in, security or acompliance certification such as ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.
• Deep JavaScript / TypeScript experience: Comfortable designing module systems, not just working in them.
• Cloud-native data at scale: Managed NoSQL or document databases in production.
• Strong yet balanced perspectives on architecture: You have designed systems, not just inherited them.
• Real-time systems: WebSockets or equivalent in production.
• Frontend proficiency: Modern TypeScript frontends, and ideally 3D or canvas-based UIs.
• Cloud infrastructure: Storage, CDN, and serverless compute on a major cloud provider.
• Payments & billing: Subscription billing integration at depth.
• AI-native development: You actively use tools like Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, or Copilot and can evaluate how they fit into team workflows.
• Security awareness: Experience hardening web applications, APIs, and authentication.

WHY FORMAS

• Future-Proof Your Career. Use the latest AI tools every day and build a skillset most creatives won’t have for years, at a company building with AI, not reacting to it.
• Real Ownership Early. Your work ships and gets seen, at an early, defining stage of the brand.
• Direct Collaboration with Founders. Carlos Bañón (award-winning architect, Associate Professor at SUTD) and Goh Yiping (serial tech entrepreneur, former Partner at McKinsey).
• Remote & Flexible. Fully remote arrangements possible, with the freedom to work where you do your best work.

HOW TO APPLY

Send your application to careers@formas.ai with:

• Your Resume / CV
• A brief note on a system you have architected and what you would do differently today
• Links to any relevant work (GitHub, projects, writing)

We’re growing fast. Whether you see the perfect role or not, we’d love to hear from you.