Lead Engineer

About the Role

You will serve as our first engineering hire and act as a technical co-owner of v1. You have full autonomy to determine how the product is built, you will personally implement its most challenging components, and you will establish the standards for future engineers joining the team.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own architecture and make all critical technical decisions for v1, from initial commit through deployment to our first thousand users.
• Design a robust agent platform encompassing task planning, tool calling protocols, background execution engines, retry mechanisms, and per-user memory management systems.
• Write production-grade code daily in this hands-on role; it is not a management position but an individual contributor focused on core development.
• Lay the foundational infrastructure early: configure repositories, establish CI/CD pipelines, set up testing environments, implement logging and monitoring solutions, and ensure security basics are met from day one.
• Make strategic build-versus-buy decisions for APIs and managed services to optimize our cost-per-user metrics.
• Collaborate with the founder to define cost and latency guardrails for LLM and voice usage, tracking these metrics weekly.
• Participate in technical interviews to set a high quality bar for future engineering hires.
• Maintain comprehensive written specs and decision logs so that architectural choices are always documented and understandable without guessing.
• Actively push back on scope creep with the founder, focusing efforts only on features essential enough to ship v1 successfully.