Founding Engineering Lead

You'll be Sylvan Labs' Founding Engineering Lead—part commando shipping the first version of hard things, part strategist on applied AI problems in enterprise software. You'll own technical architecture end-to-end while shaping product roadmap and ML strategy alongside the founders, leading a pod of three to four engineers while staying hands-on with the code that matters most.

What You'll Do

• Build and lead a pod of engineers, owning their growth, performance, and hiring while remaining the primary shipper on critical work.
• Own the core platform architecture, making build-versus-buy and infrastructure decisions that directly impact revenue.
• Set engineering standards and practices for a team where AI agents write significant portions of the code—defining review criteria, definition of done, release cadence, and on-call rotations.
• Spearhead technical designs and initial builds on new initiatives rather than reviewing others' work.
• Stay close enough to frontier ML research to argue what applies to live systems versus what's still speculative.
• Shape technical direction with the CTO on product roadmap, model strategy, and ML approach.
• Operate at a 75% building, 25% leading ratio initially, with the mix shifting over time.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of engineering experience, ideally as a technical founder, founding engineer, or staff IC who led a pod at a high-bar organization.
• You were the primary author on something shipped in the last six months, owning delivery end-to-end with minimal oversight.
• Proven track record holding other engineers accountable as a tech lead, pod lead, or manager.
• Applied ML judgment—both classical (knowing which technique fits which data, catching validation flaws early) and frontier (informed opinions on transformers, world models, and agent applications).
• You've built your own setup rather than living on defaults, and you consistently extract more value from AI agents than most people do.
• High tolerance for ambiguity, inherited code, and unglamorous work.

Location

In-office in New York City.