Tech Lead

About The Role

We're a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered voice and messaging agents for enterprise call centers — automating customer service, lead qualification, and appointment scheduling at scale. Founded in 2023 and operating in a fast-moving space alongside players like Parloa, Vapi, Retell AI, and Cognigy, we're a small, high-velocity team looking for a Tech Lead to help shape our engineering foundation and take us through our next phase of growth. This is a hands-on leadership role — you'll be writing code, making architectural decisions, and directly mentoring engineers. If you're excited about conversational AI, love building real products that ship to production, and want a clear path toward CTO-track influence, this could be a great fit.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and lead AI/ML systems powering voice and text-based conversational agents in production
• Define and drive the engineering strategy, balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalability
• Mentor and grow a team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and go-to-market teams to translate business goals into technical roadmaps
• Advocate for and communicate technical decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Own deployment and reliability of ML models and cloud infrastructure in a SaaS environment
• Stay current with the latest developments in LLMs, NLP, and voice AI — and bring the best ideas into the product

What We're Looking For

• Required: 6–10+ years of software/ML engineering experience, with a meaningful portion in leadership or staff-level roles
• Proven experience designing and scaling AI/ML systems, ideally at a cloud-based SaaS company or high-growth startup
• Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and deploying ML models to production
• Demonstrated people management and mentorship skills — you've led engineers and driven engineering culture
• Excellent communication skills; comfortable bridging technical and non-technical audiences
• Must have the right to work in the United States — no visa sponsorship is available

Nice to Have

• Experience in call center, customer service automation, or enterprise voice platforms
• Background at an AI-focused startup or conversational AI platform
• Familiarity with real-time audio/speech pipelines or telephony integrations
• Prior experience scaling an engineering team from early-stage through Series A/B

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation details will be discussed during the interview process and will be competitive with early-stage AI startup benchmarks, including equity commensurate with the Tech Lead seniority level.

Location

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We are an in-person / hybrid team — candidates who prefer fully remote arrangements are not a strong fit at this stage. Relocation is welcome; visa sponsorship is not available.