Engineering Lead, AI Email App — Scale AI-powered Workflows

ActAI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

ActAI in Palo Alto is seeking an Engineering Lead for the AI Email App to own the engineering layer that turns AI capability into a reliable product. You will shape the architecture across backend services, APIs, and client applications, while leading a small team of senior engineers.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Hands-on background building and shipping backend systems in production.
• Experience building AI-powered products or systems integrating with modern ML/LLM capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Design reliable systems for AI-powered workflows, including state, orchestration, tool use, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.
• Build the APIs and abstractions that connect AI systems to real-world product experiences.
• Lead a small, senior engineering team and raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship.
• Make high-impact trade-offs across latency, reliability, cost, security, and user experience.
• Establish strong production foundations: observability, monitoring, testing, and operational excellence.
• Partner closely with ML leadership to turn model capabilities into robust, shippable product experiences.
• Move quickly while keeping the architecture simple, maintainable, and ready to scale.

Skills

Leadership

Backend engineering

AI product experience

System design

Mentorship

Code quality

Job description

ActAI in Palo Alto is seeking an Engineering Lead for the AI Email App to own the engineering layer that turns AI capability into a reliable product. You will shape the architecture across backend services, APIs, and client applications, while leading a small team of senior engineers.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.