Founding Lead Engineer

San Francisco, California

Development - Back End

Permanent

Our client, an AI-driven startup, is hiring a Founding Lead Engineer to join their team in San Francisco. The successful candidate will play a key role in building and scaling the platform, from writing production-grade code, shaping technical architecture, managing external engineering partners, making strategic build-versus-buy decisions and helping define the company’s long-term technology vision.

Responsibilities

Develop AI-powered systems that convert fragmented vendor catalogues into structured, searchable product data.
Build ingestion, enrichment, tagging and recommendation pipelines to support large-scale inventory management.
Create intelligent workflows that seamlessly connect inspiration, discovery and purchasing experiences.
Design scalable backend infrastructure and product architecture capable of supporting rapid growth.
Partner closely with the founder/CEO to rapidly translate customer feedback into intuitive product features.
Assess, implement and optimize modern AI tools, APIs and multimodal technologies.
Provide technical guidance to contractors and engineering contributors while maintaining high development standards.
Contribute to the company’s long-term technical strategy as the platform and engineering function evolve.

Skillset

Proven experience designing, building and launching modern web applications from concept through to production.
Strong technical expertise across backend engineering, APIs, cloud platforms and scalable system architecture.
Hands-on experience working with AI-driven products, large language models, retrieval systems or intelligent automation workflows.
Excellent product judgement with the ability to balance speed of execution, quality and practical decision-making.
Comfortable thriving in an early-stage startup environment with significant ownership and autonomy.
Experience leading technical initiatives, collaborating across teams or mentoring engineers.
Genuine interest in building user-focused AI products that solve meaningful operational and workflow challenges.