Founding Lead Engineer

Our client, an AI-driven startup, is hiring a Founding Lead Engineer to join their team in San Francisco. The successful candidate will play a key role in building and scaling the platform, from writing production-grade code, shaping technical architecture, managing external engineering partners, making strategic build-versus-buy decisions and helping define the company’s long-term technology vision.

Responsibilities

• Develop AI-powered systems that convert fragmented vendor catalogues into structured, searchable product data.

• Build ingestion, enrichment, tagging and recommendation pipelines to support large-scale inventory management.

• Create intelligent workflows that seamlessly connect inspiration, discovery and purchasing experiences.

• Design scalable backend infrastructure and product architecture capable of supporting rapid growth.

• Partner closely with the founder/CEO to rapidly translate customer feedback into intuitive product features.

• Assess, implement and optimize modern AI tools, APIs and multimodal technologies.

• Provide technical guidance to contractors and engineering contributors while maintaining high development standards.

• Contribute to the company’s long-term technical strategy as the platform and engineering function evolve.

Skillset

• Proven experience designing, building and launching modern web applications from concept through to production.

• Strong technical expertise across backend engineering, APIs, cloud platforms and scalable system architecture.

• Hands-on experience working with AI-driven products, large language models, retrieval systems or intelligent automation workflows.

• Excellent product judgement with the ability to balance speed of execution, quality and practical decision-making.

• Comfortable thriving in an early-stage startup environment with significant ownership and autonomy.

• Experience leading technical initiatives, collaborating across teams or mentoring engineers.

• Genuine interest in building user-focused AI products that solve meaningful operational and workflow challenges.

Benefits

• Salary: Circa. $175k.