Founding AI Engineering Leader — Build & Scale Platform

Stealth Startup; New York (NY); On-site; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup in New York City is seeking an AI-native engineering leader who still builds. Reporting to the CEO, you will inherit a seven-person distributed team, own architecture and technical quality, and help turn a rapidly growing agentic-services business into a scalable software platform.

You’ll operate across code, product decisions, customer problems, hiring, and long-term technical strategy in a single day.

Qualifications

• Personally built and shipped an AI-native or agentic product used by real customers.
• Hands-on production experience with LLM APIs and agent orchestration.
• Experience leading a distributed engineering team and managing offshore partners.
• Located within commuting distance of NYC and able to work on-site.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and architecture for an agentic AI platform in production.
• Remain hands-on through coding, architecture, code reviews, and core product development.
• Lead a distributed team of two US-based engineers and five offshore developers.
• Build reliable systems for agent orchestration, evaluation, observability, and safeguards.
• Create a tech roadmap balancing experimentation with scalability and quality.
• Recruit, manage, and develop engineers as the company grows.
• Partner with founders on product strategy, customer needs, and hiring.
• Improve development velocity without sacrificing reliability, security, or maintainability.
• Represent technology to customers, investors, partners, and future hires.

Skills

LLM APIs

Agent orchestration

Observability

Retrieval

Tool use

Human-in-the-loop workflows

Production experience

Distributed team leadership

Architectural design

Job description

Stealth Startup in New York City is seeking an AI-native engineering leader who still builds. Reporting to the CEO, you will inherit a seven-person distributed team, own architecture and technical quality, and help turn a rapidly growing agentic-services business into a scalable software platform.

You’ll operate across code, product decisions, customer problems, hiring, and long-term technical strategy in a single day.