Tech Lead ($220K+ base salary)

Leaping AI; San Francisco (CA); In loco; USD 250.000 - 350.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

Leaping AI in San Francisco seeks a hands-on CTO to lead an engineering team building voice and SMS AI agents for home-improvement customers. You will review code, shape the architecture, and mentor a small team while delivering performant systems.

The role emphasizes latency under 1 second for millions of monthly calls, hiring 10+ engineers next year, and collaborating closely with founders to align tech with business goals.

Competenze

• Led a team of 4+ engineers at a fast-growing startup.
• Owns architecture and system bottlenecks, improves delivery.
• Mentors engineers and sets engineering processes.
• Aligns engineering work with business goals.

Mansioni

• Lead the engineering team, review code, own team output.
• Make architectural decisions for latency-critical distributed system.
• Set up engineering best practices and processes, mentoring.
• Task prioritization to support business objectives.
• Contribute to the codebase yourself (20-30% time).
• Hire >10 engineers over the next 12 months.

Conoscenze

People leadership

Architectural design

Latency optimization

Code reviews

Mentoring

Strategic planning

Strumenti

Python

Next.js

Postgres

Azure

Inngest

Twilio

Telnyx

Descrizione del lavoro

I'm Arkadiy, co-founder and CTO of Leaping AI. We build voice and SMS AI agents for home improvement companies. Every appointment we book by phone is worth $20k+ for them, generating millions of new revenue for our customers.

We were top 1% of our YC batch by growth. Closed an oversubscribed $4.7M seed in 3 days. We doubled ARR in the first half of 2026 and are aiming to double it again by year end. Current technical team consists of 3 engineers + me.

The role

• Lead the engineering team, review code, own team output
• Make architectural decisions (latency-critical distributed system)
• Set up engineering best practices and processes, mentoring
• Task prioritization to support business objectives
• Contribute to the codebase yourself (20-30% of your time)
• Hire >10 engineers over the next 12 months

The technical problem

• Scale and latency. We handle \~3M phone calls a month. We need to be able to grow that exponentially while holding p95 end-to-end latency under 1 second.
• From calls to an operating system. Phone calls and SMS are the atoms that are tied by the long-running campaigns. The goal is an operating system for home improvement and adjacent industries with a CRM expansion.
• Self-improving agents. An agent that watches the voice agents, proposes changes, A/B tests them automatically against live traffic, and promotes or rejects the change. A closed loop with humans only at the edges.

You

• Led a team of 4+ engineers at a fast-growing startup
• See the eng org as a system: find the bottleneck, fix it, find the next one
• Excellent people skills. You enjoy coordinating and talking to people.
• Curiosity and attention to detail
• Passion for building elegant, performant, agentic, latency-critical distributed systems (so many buzzwords, I know)

First 30/60/90 Days

• 0-30: You've paired with me on code reviews and architecture calls. You've shipped code across our voice service, backend, and frontend, so you know the system first-hand. You've had a 1:1 with every engineer and FDE.
• 30-60: You collaborate with me on the eng roadmap and own its execution. I've stopped reviewing most code. Dev productivity and system observability have measurably improved.
• 60-90: Engineering runs without me in the loop day-to-day, and I'm spending that time with customers. You're leading a new product expansion. You hold mentoring sessions with engineers.

How we work

• In person 4 days a week, California Street in SF with one WFH day.
• Stack: Python, Next.js, Postgres, Azure, Inngest, Twilio+Telnyx

About Arkadiy

In my previous life, I built infrastructure for DALL-E 2 and led an academic research team on autonomous extraterrestrial rovers, as well as worked on the computer vision team for autonomous trucking.