Founding Engineering Lead

We are looking for a Founding Engineering Lead with 5+ years of engineering experience to join Sylvan Labs as the technical backbone of our engineering org. You'll be a hands-on builder (75% IC) shipping product enhancements that take our platform from early traction to self-serve scale, while providing technical mentorship and leadership (25%) to a small pod of engineers — with a clear path to Head of Engineering / VP of Engineering.

What will you be doing?

Shipping product enhancements end-to-end to move the platform from founder-led delivery to a scalable, self-serve motion

Owning technical architecture decisions and re-architecting existing systems alongside the CTO

Leveraging cutting-edge AI agents and building custom development harnesses to maximize engineering velocity

Leading a pod of 2-3 engineers — providing technical mentorship, sprint scoping, and eventually people management

Shaping the ML and product roadmap, including longer-term plans around custom model training and agentic pipelines

Key Requirements

5+ years of engineering experience with no more than ~3 years in pure management — must be actively shipping code today

Deeply AI-native: has built custom agent-driven development workflows, uses multi-agent orchestration, and can walk through their current dev setup in detail

Strong applied ML fundamentals — understands classical ML algorithms, data science workflows, and can hold informed opinions on LLM training and transformer architectures

Full-stack capable (React, Next.js, Python, Node.js) with a backend lean — red flag if they only want to do one side

Based in or willing to relocate to New York City; must work on-site full-time