Founding Engineering Lead

About the Role Join an early-stage B2B SaaS team as its hands-on engineering lead, shaping platform architecture and applied machine learning strategy alongside the technical founders. You will lead a small engineering pod while building and shipping critical product work, helping establish the technical foundation and practices for the team. What You'll Do Lead a pod of three to four engineers, supporting their growth, performance, and hiring while remaining hands-on with key projects. Own core platform architecture, infrastructure decisions, build-versus-buy choices, and cost considerations. Set engineering standards, code review criteria, release practices, definitions of done, and on-call policies. Lead technical design and initial implementation for new initiatives. Evaluate applied machine learning approaches and distinguish techniques ready for production from those that are still speculative. Partner with the technical leadership team on product direction, model strategy, and the engineering roadmap. What We're Looking For Typically 5 to 8 years of engineering experience, with exceptional candidates who have 4 to 5 years also considered. Experience training and deploying machine learning models in production, beyond integrating third-party LLM APIs. End-to-end ownership of technical architecture, including infrastructure and build-versus-buy decisions. Experience setting engineering practices and holding a team accountable as a technical or people lead. Recent experience personally shipping software end-to-end, along with strong hands-on coding skills. Applied ML judgment across classical methods and newer approaches, plus experience using AI coding agents effectively. Comfort working through ambiguity, existing code, and practical delivery challenges. Compensation & Benefits Base salary is $200,000 to $400,000 annually, with equity. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location On-site in New York City.