Technical Lead

About the role

Certus Recruitment is partnering with an Austin-based technology organization making a significant investment in AI, advanced automation and agentic engineering. They're building frontier AI models and AI agents directly into their core technology environment – not as experiments, but as systems performing meaningful work in production environments where accuracy, reliability and performance matter. They're now looking for a senior engineer to help shape what comes next. This is a technical leadership role, but it's not a move away from coding. You'll remain highly hands-on while helping establish the architecture, engineering standards and operating patterns that allow autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents to work reliably within carefully engineered constraints.

Responsibilities

• Leading projects across the agentic AI platform
• Designing and building production-grade AI agent systems
• Defining architecture, interfaces and technical direction
• Establishing approaches to evaluation, testing, validation and safeguards
• Helping determine how AI-generated engineering work is constrained and verified
• Removing technical roadblocks and driving development forward
• Influencing the AI and engineering roadmap
• Helping hire and develop the engineering team as it grows
• Working directly with technical and business stakeholders

Requirements

• 5–8 years' hands-on software engineering experience
• Previous technical leadership experience – a formal Lead title isn't necessary
• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Practical experience building agentic AI systems that have operated in production
• Experience with AI agents performing substantive work within engineered constraints
• An understanding of where autonomous systems fail and how to test, validate and safeguard their output
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code
• Comfortable working across languages and frameworks – potentially including Python, .NET or similar environments
• You don't need to have completed an organization's entire transition to agentic engineering – very few people have. What matters is that you've actually started doing it, encountered the real-world problems and developed informed technical opinions from production experience.

Pay

$140,000–$170,000 salary