Lead Quality Engineer - On-Site (Irvine)
About The Position
dEggs Unlimited is a global supplier of eggs, servicing major retail and food manufacturing companies. We are building an intelligent operating platform for a global food supply chain, combining AI models, operational data, and business rules. This role is for a hands-on quality engineer embedded with operations, responsible for defining 'working' criteria, shipping fixes and improvements directly, and ensuring the product is fit for use. The role involves AI-assisted development, with a strong emphasis on human judgment, controls, and production quality. The product layer is largely greenfield, requiring the engineer to build practical, scalable solutions that integrate with existing operational systems. The position requires an understanding of how system failures can be costly and the ability to quantify these risks.
Requirements
- Experience owning quality in production systems, including acceptance criteria, evaluation strategy, and judgment on release decisions.
- Ability to ship production code and be accountable for its performance, regardless of how it was produced.
- Serious agentic development practice, including task decomposition, context management, output review and reconciliation, test and evaluation design, and knowing when not to use an agent.
- Demonstrated ownership, carrying projects end-to-end and being accountable for their success, including shipping fixes to code not originally written.
- Sufficient backend, data, and deployment competence to build instrumentation, integrate systems, and debug production independently.
- Judgment about correctness in nondeterministic systems, including evaluations, observability, failure-mode thinking, guardrails, human escalation, and rollback.
- Ability to explain risks to non-engineers in terms of cost.
- Experience working within operational reality, including email, spreadsheets, chat threads, and phone calls.
Nice To Haves
- Food distribution, logistics, retail and CPG, trading, ERP or EDI, financial operations, or other trading-partner ecosystems.
- Experience in ambiguous, high-ownership environments where building and proving were the same job (e.g., founder, early employee, software engineer in test who wrote production code, forward-deployed engineer).
Responsibilities
- Define 'working' criteria before anything is built, in agreement with the desk and engineer, with evidence to settle it.
- Act as the gatekeeper for go-live decisions, clearing work quickly when evidence supports it and delaying when it does not.
- Direct agents to generate test suites, probe for unspecified failures, run evaluations over real operating history, and maintain regression coverage.
- Ship fixes and improvements directly for product issues, integration seams, other features, or necessary improvements, rather than filing tickets.
- Collaborate with the business by getting users onto workflows early and validating with stakeholders.
- Own triage and fixes for post-launch failures, proactively addressing issues before operators discover them.
- Report on system correctness, failure rates, and human escalation frequency against a defined baseline.
- Ensure systems are maintainable, tested, observable, secure, with explicit evaluations, audit trails, rollback paths, and safe failure modes.
- Ship agent-generated work to the same production standard as manually written code.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Company-paid life and disability insurance.
- 401(k) plan with company match.
- Generous PTO accruals, increasing each year.
- Free daily lunch, snacks, and refreshments.
- Modern hardware and access to leading models and development tools.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
