Founding Director of Engineering - AI-Native Venture Studio

Role Description

We build many products at once with small teams of humans + AI coding agents. You run that engine — you lead the product managers, orchestrate the agent fleets, set the technical bar, and still ship code yourself. Player-coach, not a hands-off manager.

We're an AI-native venture studio. We stand up new software products — our own and for clients — fast, on top of an in-house agent platform. Our operating model is humans and AI coding agents on one board: work gets assigned to agents like teammates, and a small team ships what used to take a big one. You'd be the person who makes that machine run across the portfolio.

What you get here that you won't get most places:

• Real scope, real ownership. You own delivery across multiple products, lead the PMs/builders who run them, and are the technical truth-source the team ladders up to.
• No budget cap for tokens, no babysitting. Best-in-class tooling, frontier models, every AI coding harness and agent framework you want — and nobody counting your tokens.
• A brilliant CTO to build alongside. You report to a CPO/CTO who is genuinely excellent and hands-on; you'll get sharper fast, and you'll have the air cover to move.
• Frontier work, not maintenance. Agentic systems, net-new products, an internal platform that builds other products.
• Top-of-market pay, paid properly and on time. We pay our best people what they're worth and we don't play games with it.
• No politics, no process theater. We're direct with each other — genuine, but not soft. Speed, output, and quality beat ceremony.

What you'll actually do:

• Lead the product managers / builder-leads. Each owns a product or venture; you set direction, unblock, review, and raise their tempo and quality. You hire and grow this team.
• Orchestrate humans + AI agents. Break product bets into work for people and for agent fleets, decide what's an agent job vs. deterministic code, and get correct, shipped output back.
• Stay hands-on. You still architect and write code — the hardest plumbing, the risky spikes, the reference implementations.
• Own the portfolio's delivery. Multiple products shipping in parallel, fast, without it turning to mush.
• Set the standards that let a small team ship safely at speed — CI, review, evals, security and logging conventions.
• Reason commercially. Figure out why a product or funnel isn't working from first principles, and fix the real cause.

Qualifications

• You're a player-coach. You lead people and you still ship.
• You're an agentic-engineering native. You build with AI at the systems level.
• You get leverage through others. You've led engineers and/or product managers.
• You've shipped, fast, more than once. Ideally you've founded or led 0→1 products.
• You see the whole board. Technical, but you reason about the business and the user.
• You're right, and so is your team's work. You install the standards that mean shipped work is tested and works.
• You're high-agency. You make sensible calls, document assumptions, and ship.
• You can take a punch and throw one. You engage, defend your thinking with substance, and bounce back.
• You live in the frontier. Your feed is AI all day.

Requirements

• You've led an engineering and/or product team — managed engineers and/or product managers.
• Hands-on agentic depth — you build with LLMs and agent frameworks.
• A portfolio of shipped products — things you founded, led, or personally built and drove.
• Commercial fluency — startup / agency / B2B-SaaS / GTM context.
• Range — you can go from architecture and code review to a live product decision.
• Bonus: experience orchestrating AI agents across multiple products, martech/sales-tech depth, or a venture-studio background.

What this role is NOT

• Not a hands-off manager. If you haven't shipped code in two years and don't want to, this isn't it.
• Not a pure IC. If you'd rather build alone than get leverage through a team and agents, this isn't it either.
• Not a process/ceremony role. We want guardrails, not gates.
• Not a place that needs all-nighters. We want you thinking at your best.

Compensation

For the genuine article this is a top-of-market seat: roughly $15,000–$40,000 / month USD (~$180K–$480K annualized), contractor, paid monthly and on time.

Logistics

• Type & framing: We start as a paid engagement — the best leaders we hire often run their own thing.
• Location: Remote, anywhere with enough daily overlap to actually lead the team.
• Exclusivity: Flexible to start; the strongest engagements grow into primary over time.

How to apply

• No long form, no unpaid take-home busywork. We want to see what you've built and how you lead.
• Show us something real you led or built — a product you founded/led, a team you built, an agent system you shipped.
• A studio teardown: "You're handed 3 new product bets, 2 product managers, and a fleet of AI coding agents, and asked to ship all three to a working v1 in 30 days. How do you set it up?"
• One line: what's something in AI/agents you started using in the last 2–3 weeks, and why?