Founding Engineering Lead

Product.ai; California; On-site; USD 260,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Product.ai is seeking a senior technical leader to set the strategy for engineers building beside AI agents that write much of the code. You will design the gates that decide when outputs ship, and operate at CTO/VP of Engineering scope without an org chart.

This role requires clear reasoning, rigorous architecture decisions, and the ability to articulate priorities in company-wide discussions. In a founder-owned, bootstrapped environment, you will influence the technical roadmap, coordinate

Job description

You set the technical strategy for engineers who build beside AI agents that write most of the code, and you design the gates that decide when their output ships. A CTO's depth and a strategist's clarity, with no org chart to manage.

Product.ai is the verification layer for commerce, the intelligence that tells you what is actually true about a product, including when not to buy. SimplyCodes, its first proof at scale, is the code verification service, at ~$22M a year in revenue. We are 100% founder-owned, profitable, and bootstrapped since 2009. No outside investors. No board. Fewer than twenty operators outbuilding companies 10x our size.

Why This Role Exists

Agents write much of the code here now, and it ships only because deterministic gates, checks written as software, decide what an agent's output is allowed to do. A small founding bench built those gates, and each engineer on it runs their own system end to end. That model scales the individual seats it was designed for. Nothing yet owns the technical strategy across all of it: what gets built next and in what order, which gate has to tighten before the next model generation makes today's checks too loose or too slow, and how to say all of that plainly in the room where the company decides what to build.

This seat is that owner. It is not a manager layered over engineers who already run their own systems; nobody reports to it, by design. It is a technical peer to the founder, the kind of person who could hold a CTO or VP of Engineering title elsewhere, who sets direction by argument rather than authority, co-designs the gate architecture a multi-agent build loop runs inside, and carries the reasoning past the codebase into company strategy. In the age of AI, engineering leadership is a different job: fewer people, more agents, and the leverage sits