Founding Engineering Lead

AnswerThis•San Francisco, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

This is building the research workspace for scientific knowledge inside enterprises. Our agents search, synthesize, and draft evidence-based research autonomously. More than 200,000 researchers use the platform across universities and Fortune 500 companies. We’re YC-backed, growing fast, and small on purpose. Trillions of dollars flow into global R&D every year. Researchers still spend enormous amounts of time manually finding papers, writing literature reviews, and assembling evidence packages. This work decides whether new drugs and medical devices reach patients. We’re turning it into a living, compounding system.

Requirements

Senior engineer who has built AI agent systems in production.
Led teams at startups.
Shipped under uncertainty, without perfect specs, on timelines that did not make sense on paper.
Experience with Next.js, Python/FastAPI, retrieval, agents, and production infrastructure.
Experience working directly with enterprise customers.
Experience making scope calls with limited information.
Experience measuring success by business impact.
Understanding of how to scale engineering teams.
Experience operating in a startup environment.
Optimizes for business impact over elegance.

Responsibilities

Own the technical architecture and product velocity end to end, from customer problem to deployed solution.
Work directly with enterprise customers.
Make hard scope calls with limited information.
Measure success by business impact.
Build the engineering team over time.
Design the transition for a growing engineering team.
Architecture and execution across Next.js, Python/FastAPI, retrieval, agents, and production infrastructure.
Fast product iteration with researchers and enterprise customers.
Reliability, quality, and observability for high-stakes scientific workflows.
The engineering culture and team we build next.