Founding Engineering Lead

Description

You will set technical direction for engineers who build alongside AI agents that write most of the code, and you will design the checks that decide when that output can ship. The role combines the depth of a CTO with the clarity of a strategist, and it has no reports.

The company sells verification for commerce: software that establishes what is true about a product, including when a buyer should hold off. Its first large deployment is a code verification service that brings in about $22M a year. The company is profitable, has been bootstrapped since 2009, and is 100% owned by its founders, with no outside investors and no board. There are fewer than twenty operators, and they out-build companies ten times their size.

Agents now write much of the code, and it reaches customers only because deterministic gates, which are checks written as software, decide what an agent's output may do. A small founding group built those gates, and each engineer runs their own system from start to finish. That setup works for the individual seats it was built for, but nobody yet owns technical strategy across all of them. That includes deciding what gets built next and in what order, knowing which gate must tighten before a new model generation makes current checks too loose or too slow, and explaining these choices clearly where the company decides what to build.

This seat fills that gap. It is not a manager over engineers who already run their own systems, and nobody reports to it by design. It is a technical peer to the founder, someone who could hold a CTO or VP of Engineering title elsewhere. Influence comes from argument rather than authority. The holder helps design the gate architecture that a multi-agent build loop runs within and takes the same reasoning into company strategy.

The system you will work in: the company ships agent-written code under the control of gates. The spec is executable, and the architecture is designed so machines can read it. Gates, not headcount, are how the company scales, and they need updating whenever the underlying model changes.

The structure is flat, with no engineering manager layer. Each engineering seat owns its area from start to finish and answers to its own charter and to the founder. Technical strategy has to work through persuasion.

Checking agent output can cost nearly as much as doing the work, and when it does, delegation stops saving time. Hiring standards and gate design must therefore be planned together, or autonomy stops paying off.

Coordination cost climbs quickly once several agents run at once. This is why the company does not need a manager, and why this seat advises as a peer instead of multiplying headcount.

Since August, any operator can change the company's operating rules without asking the founder first. Your strategy has to work within that rule.

Heavy delegation erodes skills. This seat keeps the founding engineers, including the holder, hands-on enough to step in when an agent loop gets stuck, rather than only reviewing output from a distance.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy and sequencing for the founding engineers: decide what gets built next and in what order across the serving layer, the agent build loop and the product surfaces. Make the case for each choice and defend it, but never dictate it to a seat.
• Co-design the deterministic gate architecture with the engineers who already own parts of it. You define the invariant-level rules that decide whether a change to code, content or infrastructure is safe to ship, and you rewrite them as the underlying model changes.
• Bring the engineering view into company strategy. Turn technical facts, such as what can be built, what the codebase can handle, and what a new model makes possible or breaks, into language the founder and the company can act on. Write it clearly enough that no follow-up meeting is needed.
• Own the engineering hiring standard. Review trial work and technical interviews for every open engineering seat, and keep one craft bar across the company, without becoming the manager of any of those seats.
• Within your first quarter, co-sign a charter for this seat. It must name one number that a machine can check to show the seat is working, and it must split, in writing, what you decide on your own from what you bring to the founder.
• You have built and shipped production systems at staff or principal level. You can read an unfamiliar codebase or an agent-written diff in one sitting and check whether its stated invariant holds. You write clearly enough that a strategy memo can replace a meeting. Bonus: you have managed technical strategy against company unit economics and shipped inside an AI-native workflow built on specs, evals and deterministic gates.

Requirements

• You reason from failure modes and company goals at the same time. Given an unfamiliar service and a strategy question, you can say what will break first and what to build first, and you can defend both under pressure. You write well enough that your memos function as meetings, and people act on them. You build a working model quickly, notice when it is wrong, and correct it openly.
• You treat agents as tools to verify, not as oracles to trust. You can still do the work by hand: trace a regression, design a gate, and prove an invariant holds for a case you built yourself. That skill lets you judge whether agent output is correct or should be blocked, and it gives your strategy credibility with engineers who do this work daily.
• You have likely been the most technical person in a leadership meeting and the most strategic person in an engineering team. That could mean a small-company CTO or VP of Engineering who kept building, a staff or principal engineer whose technical strategy the organization followed, or a technical founder who shipped the product and made the key calls. The work you produced matters more than the title you held.
• This role is not a fit if you want a traditional org chart, since nobody reports to this seat. It is also not a fit if you have stopped building and mainly manage through status updates, because the day is spent reading agent-written diffs and codebases directly. It does not suit someone who needs a finished roadmap handed to them, or someone who treats a deterministic gate as a box to tick instead of the barrier between an agent's output and a customer receiving a wrong answer.
• This role suits you if having no manager, no reports and full say in technical direction is the job you have wanted.

Conditions

Total first-year compensation is $550,000 to $700,000, made up of base salary plus target first-year ownership and profit-share.

Base salary is $340,000 to $420,000. It is set above the most senior individual contributor engineering seat because this role covers technical strategy for the whole team.

Target first-year ownership and profit-share is $210,000 to $280,000.

The company is profitable and founder-owned, with about $22M in annual revenue and no venture debt.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles. The hybrid schedule requires four in-office half-days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 9am to 2pm. Wednesdays and afternoons are open for working wherever you do your best work.

Relocation support is available.

Benefits

• Profit Interest Units (PIUs) in the company's ownership and profit-share program, beyond base salary. Units have a $0 strike price and share in annual free-cash-flow distributions and tender liquidity. They are earned on performance milestones after you join and do not vest on day one.
• Family medical, dental and vision coverage, paid at 100%.
• An uncapped AI token and compute budget, allocated according to return.