Founding Engineering Lead

You set the technical strategy for engineers who build beside AI agents that write most of the code, and you design the gates that decide when their output ships. A CTO's depth and a strategist's clarity, with no org chart to manage.

Product.ai is the verification layer for commerce, the intelligence that tells you what is actually true about a product, including when not to buy. SimplyCodes, its first proof at scale, is the code verification service, at ~$22M a year in revenue. We are 100% founder-owned, profitable, and bootstrapped since 2009. No outside investors. No board. Fewer than twenty operators outbuilding companies 10x our size.

Why This Role Exists

Agents write much of the code here now, and it ships only because deterministic gates, checks written as software, decide what an agent's output is allowed to do. A small founding bench built those gates, and each engineer on it runs their own system end to end. That model scales the individual seats it was designed for. Nothing yet owns the technical strategy across all of it: what gets built next and in what order, which gate has to tighten before the next model generation makes today's checks too loose or too slow, and how to say all of that plainly in the room where the company decides what to build.

This seat is that owner. It is not a manager layered over engineers who already run their own systems; nobody reports to it, by design. It is a technical peer to the founder, the kind of person who could hold a CTO or VP of Engineering title elsewhere, who sets direction by argument rather than authority, co-designs the gate architecture a multi-agent build loop runs inside, and carries the reasoning past the codebase into company strategy. In the age of AI, engineering leadership is a different job: fewer people, more agents, and the leverage sits in the gates and the sequencing, not in headcount.

The System You'll Need to Model

• A company that ships through agent-written code, held to standard by gates. The spec is the executable and the architecture is built to be machine-legible. The gates, not headcount, are the scaling mechanism, and they age every time the model generation underneath changes.
• A flat structure with no engineering-manager layer. Every engineering seat decides its own domain end to end. Your technical strategy has to work by argument, not authority, and the engineers you work beside answer to their own seat charters and the founder.
• Verification cost governs delegation. When checking an agent's output costs nearly as much as doing the work, delegation goes net-negative. So the hiring bar and the gate design have to be built together, or autonomy stops paying.
• Coordination cost rises fast past a few concurrent agents. That is the physics behind "we don't need a manager": the seat is a technical-strategy peer, not a multiplier of headcount.
• A governance law any operator can change live. Since August any operator here can change the rules the company runs on without waiting on the founder. Your strategy operates inside that law rather than around it.
• Skill decay under heavy delegation. The seat keeps the founding bench, itself included, hands-on enough to step in when an agent loop hits a wall, not just review its output from a distance.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• Engineering technical strategy and sequencing. What the founding bench builds next and in what order, across the serving layer, the agent build loop and the product surfaces, argued and defended, never dictated to any seat.
• The deterministic gate architecture. Co-designed with the engineers who already hold pieces of it: the invariant-level rules deciding when an agent's code, content or infrastructure change is safe to ship, rewritten as the model generation underneath changes.
• The engineering voice in company strategy. You translate technical reality (what is buildable, what the codebase can bear, what a new model unlocks or breaks) into language the founder and the rest of the company can act on, in writing clear enough that no follow-up meeting is needed.
• The engineering hiring bar. You read trial work and technical interviews across open engineering seats and defend one craft bar company-wide, without being the manager any of those seats report to.
• Your seat charter. Within your first quarter you co-sign a charter for this seat. It names one machine-checkable number that proves the seat is working, and a written split of what you decide freely versus what you bring to the founder to decide.

The craft you must already own: you have personally built and shipped production systems at staff or principal depth; you can read an unfamiliar codebase or agent-authored diff in one sitting and verify whether its claimed invariant holds; and you write clearly enough that a technical-strategy memo needs no meeting. Bonus: you have carried technical strategy against company unit economics and shipped inside an AI-native harness (specs, evals, deterministic gates).

Who You Are

You reason from a system's failure modes and the company's goals at the same time. Handed an unfamiliar service and a strategy question, you can say what breaks first and what to build first, and defend both under questioning. You are an engineer who is also articulate: the memo you write is the meeting, and people act on it. You form a working model fast, notice when it's wrong, and update in the open.

You treat agents as tools you verify, never oracles you trust. You can still do the work by hand: trace a regression, design a gate, prove an invariant holds under a case you constructed yourself. That mastery is what lets you read what an agent produced and say why it's right, or refuse to ship it, and it is what gives your strategy weight with engineers who do the same every day.

You've probably been the most technical person in a leadership room and the most strategic person in an engineering room: a CTO or VP of Engineering at a small company who never stopped building, a staff or principal engineer who wrote the technical strategy their organization followed, or a technical founder who shipped the product and made the calls. We care about the artifact and the reasoning more than the title you held.

Who this isn't for. Wrong if you want a direct-report org chart; nobody reports to this seat, by design. Wrong if you left hands-on building years ago and manage through status updates; the day runs through reading agent-authored diffs and codebases directly. Wrong if you need a pre-written roadmap handed to you, or if you treat a deterministic gate as a compliance checkbox rather than what stands between an agent's output and a customer seeing a wrong answer.

You'll be happiest here if "no manager, no reports, full say" sounds like the job you always wanted.

How We Hire

We don't run traditional engineering or executive interviews.

Async video screen. About 15 minutes, on your own time. It replaces the recruiter screen. We want to see how you think, not how you present.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the founding engineers you'd work beside.

Conversation with the founder. Technical strategy, live: what you'd sequence first, which gate you'd tighten before the next model generation, and where you push back.

Paid work trial (or Fast-Track Portfolio Review). Real technical-strategy work against our codebase and next-model-generation risk, alongside judging real agent-authored diffs against live gates. Paid at a day rate. Fast-Track option: For exceptional engineering leaders with verifiable shipped systems, technical strategy artifacts, or open-source work, we can fast-track through a live technical architecture and code walkthrough in place of a multi-day trial.

If the work above sounds like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the work and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year compensation: $550,000 - $700,000 (base salary + target first-year ownership and profit-share).

• Base salary: $340,000 - $420,000, above our most senior IC engineering seat because this seat carries technical strategy across the whole bench.
• Target first-year ownership & profit-share: $210,000 - $280,000.

Product.ai is a profitable, founder-owned company generating ~$22M/yr in revenue with zero venture debt. Beyond base salary, senior operators participate in our Profit Interest Unit (PIU) ownership and profit-share program ($0 strike price units sharing in annual free-cash-flow distributions and tender liquidity, earned on performance milestones after joining, never day-one vesting). 100% family medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus an uncapped AI token and compute budget steered by return.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, on our high-trust hybrid rhythm: four focused in-office half-days (Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri 9am-2pm), with Wednesdays and afternoons open to work from wherever you do your best work. Relocation support available.