Tech Lead

About The Role

A fast-growing, Y Combinator–backed startup building AI voice and texting agents for the home improvement and home services industry is looking for a Tech Lead to scale engineering impact and organizational maturity. This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role that sits at the intersection of hands-on engineering and technical leadership — partnering directly with the CTO and senior leadership to shape architecture, processes, and team productivity. The company is at an early but rapidly scaling stage (seed-funded, ~10 employees), operating in the conversational AI / voice SaaS space. You'll help define how the engineering organization grows and executes from here. This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. No visa sponsorship is available — candidates must have the right to work in the US.

What You'll Do

• Manage the engineering team day-to-day: unblock engineers, set priorities, and drive delivery.
• Guide the team on architectural decisions and system design across the full stack and cloud infrastructure.
• Hold final say on task prioritization and delivery tradeoffs.
• Review code and RFCs to maintain quality, consistency, and engineering standards.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices and processes as the team scales.
• Act as a technical liaison and thought partner to the CEO, CTO, Director of Sales, and Head of Customer Success.
• Contribute actively to the codebase (~20–30% of your time).
• Raise the overall productivity and maturity of the engineering organization.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with recent roles as a Staff Engineer or Tech Lead.
• Proven leadership and people management experience — you've led engineering teams and mentored engineers.
• Strong background in software architecture, cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure preferred; AWS/GCP also relevant), and full-stack development.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and conversational AI / voice technology — this is a hard requirement.
• Experience working in fast-growing startups or scale-ups and shipping quality product under pressure.
• Excellent project management, prioritization, and organizational skills.
• Strong people skills and genuine business acumen — you think about how technical decisions affect revenue and customers.
• Ability and willingness to work in-office in San Francisco, CA.
• Right to work in the United States (no visa sponsorship available).

Nice to Have

• Prior leadership experience in a conversational AI or voice technology product.
• Experience deploying ML/NLP models in production at scale in cloud-based SaaS environments.
• Track record of advocating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders across go-to-market and customer-facing functions.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $220,000 – $250,000 USD annually
• Early-stage equity in a funded, high-growth startup
• Direct impact on product, team, and company trajectory from an early stage

Location

San Francisco, CA — on-site (in-office)
Remote work is not available for this role
No visa sponsorship; candidates must have existing US work authorization