AI Team Lead: Hands-on Tech Leader for AI Delivery

Valid8 Financial, Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Valid8 Financial, Inc. seeks an AI Team Lead to guide the engineering team in delivering robust AI-driven workflows while maintaining high-quality code and a healthy architecture.

This hands-on, player-coach role emphasizes fostering distributed decision-making, architectural discipline, and production readiness. You will mentor engineers, participate in hiring, and partner with Product Management to translate priorities into technically sound plans.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating production agentic AI workflows using LangChain.
• 5+ years experience with Python and Next.js.
• Familiarity with Angular and SPA development.
• Experience with containers and cloud-native application patterns.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, and modern software delivery.
• Experience working within a DevOps philosophy, including ownership of deployment, observability, reliability, and production support.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, APIs, data modeling, performance, scalability, and security.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical decisions and developing engineers.

Responsibilities

• Create a culture of distributed technical ownership and decision-making.
• Drive use of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for significant decisions.
• Drive AI adoption across the team.
• Ensure decisions consider tradeoffs, risks, and existing architectural precedent.
• Encourage engineers to lead technical design, providing guidance and challenge.
• Drive engineering best practices across design, development, testing, security, observability, performance, and reliability.
• Keep technical debt and architectural risk visible and actively managed.
• Stay close to the code and systems the team owns.
• Contribute directly to complex, high-risk, or strategically important work.
• Participate in technical design and code reviews.
• Pair with engineers on difficult problems and provide technical leadership during production incidents.
• Hands-on work should focus where it provides the most leverage to the team, not on maintaining the capacity of a full-time individual contributor.
• Directly manage, mentor, and develop engineers.
• Set clear expectations around quality, ownership, and performance.
• Provide regular feedback and career development.
• Develop engineers' ability to independently own technical design and decisions.
• Participate in hiring, onboarding, and performance management.
• Partner with Product Management to turn priorities into technically sound plans.
• Ensure complex work receives appropriate technical discovery and design before development.
• Surface technical risks, dependencies, and complexity early.
• Balance delivery with technical debt, reliability, and long-term platform health.
• Own the engineering execution and technical outcomes of the team.

Skills

Python

Next.js

LangChain

Leadership

Code reviews

CI/CD

Observability

Performance

Security

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Cloud-native architectures

Job description

Valid8 Financial, Inc. seeks an AI Team Lead to guide the engineering team in delivering robust AI-driven workflows while maintaining high-quality code and a healthy architecture.

This hands-on, player-coach role emphasizes fostering distributed decision-making, architectural discipline, and production readiness. You will mentor engineers, participate in hiring, and partner with Product Management to translate priorities into technically sound plans.