Lead Application Developer

USA Tech Recruit; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

USA Tech Recruit is seeking a Technical Lead, Applications for a remote-friendly role based in San Francisco to help lead an AI-driven product team. You will own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop, and guide a senior team to ship reliable, scalable software.

You will collaborate with ML leadership to translate model capabilities into features, shape architectural direction, and ensure clear abstractions and graceful failure modes across systems.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Hands-on background building and shipping backend systems in production.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products, with model integration trade-offs.
• Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.
• Comfort operating across backend, mobile, and desktop platforms.
• Proven ability to make high-impact technical decisions under ambiguity.
• Strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real-world usage.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.
• Ensure production-grade reliability: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.
• Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.
• Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behaviour, and graceful failure modes.
• Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.
• Make high-impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.
• Establish a strong execution culture through code reviews, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.

Skills

Leadership experience

Backend development

AI integration

System design

Cross-platform

Decision making

Shipping mindset

Job description

Technical Lead, Applications

- San Francisco (Remote) - Start-up + Equity

A long-standing client is expanding into the US and Europe. Starting with several hires in the US. This will involve working on a proactive AI assistant rather than a traditional chatbot, with highly reliable AI capable of completing multi-step tasks with minimal user prompting.

What You'll be Doing

Focus

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.
• Ensure production-grade reliability: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.
• Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.
• Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behaviour, and graceful failure modes.
• Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.
• Make high-impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.
• Establish a strong execution culture through code reviews, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.

What You'll Bring

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products, with a deep understanding of model integration trade-offs.
• Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.
• Comfort operating across platforms (backend, mobile, desktop), even if your depth is in one.
• Proven ability to make high-impact technical decisions under ambiguity.
• A strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real-world usage.

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