Founding Director of Engineering - AI-Native Venture Studio

AI Acquisition

6d•$15,000 - $40,000•Remote

About The Position

We are an AI-native venture studio that builds multiple software products simultaneously using small teams of humans and AI coding agents. Our operating model involves humans and AI coding agents working together, with work assigned to agents like teammates. The role involves leading this engine, managing product managers, orchestrating agent fleets, setting technical standards, and contributing to code. This is a player-coach role, not a hands-off management position. The company offers significant scope and ownership across multiple products, a build-the-organization seat, unlimited access to AI tooling and models without token caps, a collaborative CTO, work on frontier AI systems and net-new products, top-of-market compensation, and a culture that prioritizes speed, output, and quality over politics and process theater.

Requirements

Player-coach mentality: leads people and still ships code.
Agentic-engineering native: builds with AI at the systems level (agents, memory, tools, orchestration, evals, failure modes).
Daily use and pushing limits of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and agent harnesses.
Experience leading engineers and/or product managers to produce more than achievable alone, without becoming a bottleneck.
Proven track record of shipping fast, ideally founding or leading 0→1 products.
Ability to set and maintain a fast pace for a team.
Sees the whole board: technical, business, and user perspectives.
Ensures shipped work is tested and works correctly.
High-agency: makes sensible calls, documents assumptions, and ships without waiting for management.
Ability to engage in direct, constructive feedback and set a healthy-blunt culture.
Lives at the frontier of AI, actively using new tools and frameworks.

Nice To Haves

Led an engineering and/or product team, ideally at a fast, AI-native company.
Hands-on agentic depth with LLMs and agent frameworks (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, MCP, LangGraph/CrewAI, RAG, evals, n8n AI automations).
Portfolio of shipped products (founded, led, or personally built).
Commercial fluency (startup/agency/B2B-SaaS/GTM context).
Range to handle architecture, code review, product decisions, and client conversations in the same day.
Experience orchestrating AI agents across multiple products.
Martech/sales-tech depth.
Venture-studio or forward-deployed background.

Responsibilities

Lead product managers/builder-leads, setting direction, unblocking, reviewing, and raising tempo and quality.
Hire and grow the product management/builder-lead team.
Orchestrate humans and AI agents, breaking down product bets into work for people and agent fleets.
Decide what tasks are suitable for agents versus deterministic code.
Ensure correct and shipped output from human and AI teams.
Architect and write code, handling the hardest plumbing, risky spikes, and reference implementations.
Own the portfolio's delivery, ensuring multiple products ship in parallel, fast, and without quality degradation.
Make build-vs-buy-vs-agent calls and architecture decisions.
Set standards for CI, review, evals, security, and logging to maintain high quality while shipping weekly.
Reason commercially about product performance and user needs to fix underlying causes.
Install standards that ensure shipped work is tested and functional.

Benefits

Top-of-market pay, paid properly and on time.
No budget cap for tokens.
Best-in-class tooling and frontier models.
Real scope and ownership across multiple products.
Build-the-org seat.
Opportunity to build alongside a brilliant CTO/CPO.
Work on frontier AI, agentic systems, and net-new products.
Direct communication, no politics or process theater.
Flexible engagement that can grow into a primary role with real upside and stake.
USD monthly rate for international candidates.