Lead AI Engineer

Role overview

The Lead AI Engineer will become the first dedicated engineering owner for an internal technology platform used by a remote retention-marketing operation. The role combines architecture, full-stack development, data engineering, AI systems, and product judgment: auditing early tools, turning prototypes into maintainable software, and building reliable agentic workflows that support diagnostics, reporting, quality assurance, go-to-market work, and internal operations.

Responsibilities

- Review the existing systems and decide what should be retained, rebuilt, documented, or consolidated. - Establish a maintainable codebase with clear engineering standards, architecture guidelines, and operational ownership. - Design data pipelines that ingest information from external marketing platforms, model it in a relational database, keep it synchronized, and support flexible analysis. - Build and maintain AI agents and skills for account diagnostics, reporting, QA, go-to-market, and internal workflows. - Improve the consistency and reliability of internal AI tooling so teams can use it without depending on a single expert. - Evolve early internal products into dependable, scalable tools and define how product changes move from experimentation into maintained software. - Set technical direction, delivery standards, and the foundation for a future engineering function.

Requirements

- Five or more years of professional software development experience with shipped products used by real customers or teams. - Strong full-stack skills using TypeScript and/or Python, modern frontend and backend development, SQL, and relational databases. - Experience provisioning and operating cloud infrastructure, along with practical CI/CD experience. - Hands-on experience building LLM-based systems, including agents, tool use, retrieval, evaluations, prompt design, and reusable AI skills. - Strong understanding of third-party API ingestion, data modeling, synchronization, and analytical querying. - Experience owning data infrastructure end to end and working independently as the only or lead engineer. - Clear written and verbal English communication in a remote, asynchronous environment, with a proactive ownership mindset.

Nice to have

- Experience with email or SMS marketing platforms or the direct-to-consumer commerce ecosystem. - Background in martech, retention products, or fast-moving product organizations. - Experience turning agency workflows or internal tools into software products. - Familiarity with AI-assisted coding tools and strong opinions about what should be built, not only how.

Benefits and work setup

- Fully remote contractor engagement with flexible hours and overlap with U.S. working time. - 23 days of paid time off. - Generous maternity and paternity leave. - Bonus structure. - Contractor arrangement does not include healthcare coverage.