Founding VP of Engineering (ADK)

Pelico; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Pelico seeks a founding-level technologist to set technical direction, build a team, and own a new product initiative. You will lead from the front, guiding the platform for enterprise-scale manufacturing AI and governance, with direct impact on customers like Airbus and Safran.

You will work with an elite, AI-native engineering team, writing production code daily while shaping the roadmap and ownership model for the platform and its ecosystem.

Qualifications

• You have built and operated production multi-agent systems including orchestration runtimes and agent harnesses.
• You have moved early products from design partners to real revenue in regulated or demanding industries.
• You ship AI-agent products with observable evaluation, regression and drift detection, and cost/latency discipline.
• You write and review production code daily and lead senior engineers by example.
• You turn internal engines into clean, reusable platform surfaces.

Responsibilities

• Build the platform: design and ship the system used to author, run, observe, and govern agents.
• Create an environment for agents to operate, with deterministic engines and observable outcomes.
• Address multi-agent coordination and prevent conflicting agent actions.
• Earn enterprise trust by ensuring actions are reproducible and auditable.
• Define product-market fit and decide what belongs in the platform versus a product.
• Write specs and production code; grow the engineering team.

Skills

Multi-agent systems

AI coding agents

Production code

Platform design

System orchestration

Job description

About Pelico

Every 16 minutes, something disrupts how a factory runs. Supply chains don't fail from bad decisions, they fail from late ones. Pelico's platform already helps leading manufacturers anticipate and respond to blockers. Multiple AI agents are already deployed on top of the platform to drive outcomes everyday.

About The Role

Companies have multiple founding moments and Pelico is going through a new one. This is a founding seat on a new product with the ownership to match. You set the technical direction, make the calls that matter, and build the team around you. It is one of the most important things we are building, and it would be yours to lead. You benefit from company assets (data, events dependency graphs, simulation engine, next best action algorithms, etc) and customer reach as Pelico works and manages operational data of multiple leading manufacturers.

What You'll Do

• Build the platform. Design and ship the system manufacturers use to author, run, observe, and govern their agents: the canvas, the tool catalogue, model selection, the full loop. You start from real foundations, not a blank page.
• Turn the twin into an environment agents can operate in. Open up the deterministic engine so an agent can read the plan, take an action, watch the consequences propagate across millions of connected steps, and be scored on what happened to the whole factory.
• Solve the multi-agent problem. Measure each agent's true contribution, and prevent agents from undoing one another's work. This is unsolved territory, and it sits at the core of the moat.
• Earn the enterprise's trust. Make every agent action reproducible, auditable, and explainable to the bar a regulated aerospace and defense IT department will accept, with humans in the loop where it counts.
• Find product-market fit. Draw the line between what is real today and what is still vision, decide what belongs in the platform versus a single product, and turn it into a demo and a commercial story that wins enterprise deals.
• Set the bar and build the team. Write the specs and the production code, build with fleets of AI coding agents, and hire and grow the engineers who will build this with you.

About You

• You have built and operated production multi-agent systems: orchestration runtimes, tool and MCP surfaces, agent harnesses, guardrails, model selection.
• You have taken an early product from its first design-partner customer to real revenue in a demanding or regulated industry (aerospace, defense, finance, healthcare), owning both the trust bar and the path from demo to signed deal.
• Top-tier AI fluency you can show, not just claim. You've shipped AI-agent products with real eval and observability discipline (regression and drift detection, cost and latency budgets), you build with fleets of AI coding agents every day, and you have judgment on what to automate and what to keep human.
• You still write and review production code daily, and you lead senior engineers by being one of the best in the room.
• You have a platform builder's instinct: turning an internal engine into a clean surface other teams build on.

Nice To Have

• Supply chain, discrete manufacturing, or operations (planning, parts shortages, inventory).
• Enough optimization or operations-research literacy to work closely with an OR team. You don't need to be the OR scientist; that depth is already here.
• Aerospace, defense, or other regulated-industry experience (for example ITAR).

Why Pelico

If You Want The Hardest Problem And The Most Ownership We Have To Offer, This Is The Seat. What Comes With It

• A true founder mandate: real ownership, meaningful equity, and the room to build the platform and the team on your terms.
• The highest-stakes seat here. You build it for customers like Airbus and Safran, at the scale of their global operations, and the moat is something competitors cannot copy: we own both the factory simulation and the scoreboard that says whether an agent actually helped.
• A small, elite, AI-native engineering team. Be challenged, learn, and ship fast.
• Competitive salary benchmarked to your market, plus health, dental, and vision coverage and a learning budget.