AI Lead / Engineering Manager

Role overview This is a player-coach engineering leadership role for a small team building AI-driven capabilities into a customer feedback product. The work spans hands-on contribution with LLMs, embeddings, and related tooling, alongside team coordination, architecture decisions, and delivery discipline. It is a full-time engineering position focused on technical leadership, with product partnership rather than product ownership.

Responsibilities - Own team coordination, delivery timelines, workload allocation, and follow-through so planned work ships reliably - Set and enforce an engineering bar across observability, testing, security, scalable architecture, and timeboxed AI exploration - Provide direct, constructive technical feedback in code review, design discussions, and one-on-ones - Design, build, and ship AI-powered features alongside the team, from prototype through production quality - Steward key architecture decisions, including model selection and the tradeoffs between quality, cost, and latency - Flag technical risks early, particularly around AI reliability, cost, and edge-case behavior - Partner with product on requirements and priorities, and with leadership on planning, resourcing, and sequencing

Requirements - 7+ years of software engineering experience, including shipped AI features in production - 2-3 years leading delivery for a small team as a tech lead, engineering manager, or player-coach - Strong fullstack fundamentals across frontend, backend, and infrastructure - Practical experience with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG, or similar techniques in live systems - A track record of raising engineering standards while keeping teams motivated and engaged

Nice to have - Background in product management, sales, or operations - Ability to process and synthesize complex information quickly - Experience moving products upmarket into enterprise customers

Benefits and work setup - Fully remote position with location-adjusted compensation shared in writing before the first interview - Flexible time off, a small and collaborative team culture, and access to a broader community of SaaS operators - Equal opportunity employer with a stated commitment to fair and transparent pay