We're hiring the person who will own our R&D- engineering, QA, and applied AI research - as a founding-team hire.
That means all of it: what we build and how, the quality bar and how we enforce it, the AI architecture and the research that keeps it ahead, who we hire, and when we're ready to ship. You'll inherit all three functions, decide what they should look like at 3x, and build that.
You'll report directly to the founder and work alongside our Lead PM, who owns product direction and roadmap. You own how it gets built, how good it is, and how fast it moves.
A word of honesty:
This is a founding-team role at an early-stage company, which means it is hands-on. You will get into the code. You will run the QA passes yourself, on the things that matter most, even though QA isn't your only job. You will test a video session on a bad connection at 9pm because a launch depends on it. You will make calls with incomplete information and live with them. You'll lead R&D, but you'll lead by doing, not by directing. If you want a purely strategic seat with people beneath you to execute, this is the wrong role. The reverse is just as true: this is not a senior engineering job with a bigger title on it. You'll be managing people, hiring them, and answering for their work, and there's no technical leader above you to learn that from. If you haven't done it before, this isn't the place to start. If you want to own the hardest, most consequential technical problems in the company and see them through, read on.
What you'll own:
Reliability of realtime AI agents, audio and chat sessions on a user's old laptop and a sales rep's poor wifi, not just a developer's machine.
Turning a launch-phase codebase into one a growing team can work in safely.
The quality bar for everything that ships. We have a QA function today, not a QA department - part of this role is deciding what it should become, and how much of it is people versus automated test infrastructure. We don't have a fixed answer; you'll set it.
End-to-end quality of the booking-and-payments flow, including the failure paths most teams skip.
Security and privacy of sensitive sales conversation data - the controls that keep us defensible, and an independent security review you can run yourself.
The AI and agent architecture: what models, what orchestration, what runs on-device versus in the cloud, and how we stay ahead as the underlying models move.
Evaluation as a discipline - you own how we know whether the coaching is actually getting better. The evals, the benchmarks and the harnesses that tell us a change is real and not a vibe, on a product where the output is a judgment call rather than a right answer.
Turning research results into shipped product, not internal demos.
Hiring, structure and standards across all three functions.
A delivery cadence the company can plan around.
Requirements: You've managed engineers directly for 2+ years - as their manager, not as a tech lead with influence. You've hired, set the bar, run the uncomfortable conversations, and owned the outcome when someone wasn't working out.
8+ years building software overall, and you've owned technical direction rather than executing someone else's architecture.
Hands-on operator first, leader second: you lead through doing. That does not mean this is a senior IC role with a title on top - you'll be the only technical leader in the company.
You've shipped consumer-grade B2B software to production and through real users, on something that affected your customers' revenue.
Real depth in at least one of: realtime/low-latency systems, or applied LLM and agent systems in production. Credible curiosity in the other.
You can run a security review and stand up the controls behind it yourself, not just brief someone else to.
You work directly and candidly with a non-technical founder, and you translate technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders without dumbing them down.
This position is open to all candidates.