Engineering Leader

Collinear AI; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Bonuses

Job summary

Collinear AI in Sunnyvale is seeking an Engineering Leader to own the architecture and reliability of their AI agent improvement products. This hands-on role emphasizes backend systems and distributed execution.

Ideal candidates will have 7–10+ years of experience, particularly in cloud services, and a strong command of Python and distributed systems. The position offers a salary range of $200,000 to $400,000 per year, along with equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of experience building backend systems, platforms, or cloud services.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, infrastructure, and cloud-native architectures.
• Comfortable working directly with customers in a B2B setting.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, reliability, and scalability of AI agent improvement product offerings.
• Design and operate multi-tenant, distributed backend systems.
• Make platform-level decisions across infrastructure and deployment models.

Skills

Building backend systems

Distributed systems

Python

Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

Job description

About Collinear

At Collinear, we help teams fearlessly ship AI. Frontier labs and AI-native companies use our SimLab to find capability gaps in their agents and generate high-quality data to close them. We believe that the next generation of AI progress won’t come from just bigger models, but from more rigorous, long-horizon simulation and programmatic verification. SimLab allows researchers to spin up realistic environments, run agents through complex tasks, and surface failure modes under real-world conditions. We then close the loop by generating targeted synthetic data to retrain models, delivering measurable quality lift on the metrics that actually matter.

About The Role

As the Engineering Leader, you will own the architecture, reliability, and evolution of Collinear’s AI agent improvement product offerings. This role is deeply hands-on and focused on backend systems, infrastructure, and distributed execution, with a strong emphasis on performance, scalability, and enterprise readiness. You will be responsible for designing and operating the systems that support multiple customers, multiple deployment models, and an expanding set of evaluation and simulation scenarios. While people management and hiring are nice to have, the priority is technical leadership, architectural judgment, and execution in a fast-moving, customer-facing environment. This role is ideal for someone who has built and operated cloud services at scale and wants to apply that experience to a complex, high-impact AI platform.

What You’ll Do

• Own the architecture, reliability, and scalability of Collinear’s AI agent improvement product offerings.
• Design and operate multi-tenant, distributed backend systems that support enterprise customers.
• Make platform-level decisions across infrastructure, runtimes, deployment models, and developer experience.
• Translate customer needs and ambiguity into clear engineering priorities and durable platform capabilities.
• Partner with founders and research leadership on technical strategy, roadmap, and tradeoffs.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices as the platform and team scale.
• Hire and mentor engineers over time as the organization grows.

About You

We’re looking for someone who is deeply technical, product-minded, and comfortable operating with ambiguity.

You Likely Have

• 7–10+ years of experience building backend systems, platforms, or cloud services.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, infrastructure, and cloud-native architectures.
• Hands-on experience with:
  • Python (primary language today)
  • Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience building or operating B2B SaaS platforms at scale, including multitenancy and reliability concerns.
• Comfort working directly with customers in a B2B setting, including handling escalations and ambiguous requirements.
• Strong communication skills and sound technical judgment.

Nice to Have

• Experience in cloud or data infrastructure companies (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Datadog, Confluent).
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup.
• Some people management or hiring experience (not required).
• Experience working on ML platforms, evaluation systems, or large-scale data pipelines.

Collinear is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

The base salary range for this role in California is $200,000 to $400,000 per year, depending on experience, skills, and qualifications. This role will also be eligible for equity, benefits, and bonuses.

Collinear provides reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the application and hiring process. If you need an accommodation, please contact us.

Pursuant to applicable local ordinances, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.