Technical Lead

Certus Recruitment Australia; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Certus Recruitment partners with an Austin-based technology organization investing in AI, advanced automation and agentic engineering. This senior engineering role remains hands-on while shaping architecture, engineering standards and operating patterns for autonomous AI agents in production environments where reliability matters.

You will lead projects across the agentic AI platform, design production-grade AI systems, define architecture and interfaces, and establish testing and safeguards.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years hands-on software engineering experience.
• Previous technical leadership experience; formal Lead title not necessary.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Practical experience building agentic AI systems in production.
• Experience with AI agents performing substantive work within engineered constraints.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code.
• Comfortable working across languages and frameworks – potentially including Python, .NET or similar environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects across the agentic AI platform.
• Design and build production-grade AI agent systems.
• Define architecture, interfaces and technical direction.
• Establish approaches to evaluation, testing, validation and safeguards.
• Determine how AI-generated engineering work is constrained and verified.
• Remove technical roadblocks and drive development forward.
• Influence the AI and engineering roadmap.
• Help hire and develop the engineering team as it grows.
• Collaborate with technical and business stakeholders.

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

Agentic AI systems

Production experience

Python

.NET

Job description

Certus Recruitment is partnering with an Austin-based technology organization making a significant investment in AI, advanced automation and agentic engineering.

They're building frontier AI models and AI agents directly into their core technology environment – not as experiments, but as systems performing meaningful work in production environments where accuracy, reliability and performance matter.

They're now looking for a senior engineer to help shape what comes next.

This is a technical leadership role, but it's not a move away from coding.

You'll remain highly hands-on while helping establish the architecture, engineering standards and operating patterns that allow autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents to work reliably within carefully engineered constraints.

What you'll be doing:

• Leading projects across the agentic AI platform


• Designing and building production-grade AI agent systems


• Defining architecture, interfaces and technical direction


• Establishing approaches to evaluation, testing, validation and safeguards
  
• Helping determine how AI-generated engineering work is constrained and verified


• Removing technical roadblocks and driving development forward


• Influencing the AI and engineering roadmap


• Helping hire and develop the engineering team as it grows


• Working directly with technical and business stakeholders

What we're looking for:

• 5–8 years' hands-on software engineering experience


• Previous technical leadership experience – a formal Lead title isn't necessary


• Strong software engineering fundamentals


• Practical experience building agentic AI systems that have operated in production


• Experience with AI agents performing substantive work within engineered constraints


• An understanding of where autonomous systems fail and how to test, validate and safeguard their output


• Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code


• Comfortable working across languages and frameworks – potentially including Python, .NET or similar environments

You don't need to have completed an organization's entire transition to agentic engineering – very few people have.

What matters is that you've actually started doing it, encountered the real-world problems and developed informed technical opinions from production experience.

This is a rare opportunity to remain deeply technical while having significant influence over how an organization designs, governs, validates and deploys agentic AI.