Hiring: Hands-on AI Systems Lead / Founding AI Engineer — want someone who actually builds
I’m the founder of a growing services business and we’re trying to turn the company into a genuinely AI-native operation.
I’m posting anonymously because I care more about finding the right builder than promoting the company.
This is not a “make us a chatbot” job.
We already have real customers, employees, operational workflows, CRM data, research data, calls, internal knowledge and a bunch of systems that currently require humans to connect the dots.
The problem I want someone to own is essentially:
How do we build an intelligence layer across the company?
Some examples of what we’re working on:
Making Zoho function more like an AI-native CRM
Giving agents the ability to safely read/write CRM data and trigger workflows
Building a company “second brain” that agents can actually reason over
Creating AI agents for research, customer delivery, sales and internal ops
Voice agents for onboarding, qualification, follow-ups and other workflows
Building structured customer state so AI understands what has happened, what needs to happen next and why
Evaluating new models/providers and deciding when switching actually produces ROI
Creating proper evals instead of deciding whether an AI workflow “feels good”
Figuring out where agents make sense versus boring deterministic software
Reducing expensive/manual human work without destroying quality
Current environment includes things like:
Zoho / Supabase / Postgres / Next.js / APIs / webhooks / automation tools / LLM APIs / voice AI.
I am specifically looking for a player-coach.
Someone who can personally open their laptop and build the difficult parts, but can also lead a very small engineering/automation team and get other people shipping.
You might be a fit if:
You have ~5–8 years of strong software/product engineering experience
You’ve spent the last 2–4 years going very deep into applied AI/LLMs
You have actually shipped AI systems into production
You understand backend architecture, APIs, databases and integrations
You’ve worked with agents, tool calling, structured outputs, RAG/knowledge systems, evals, voice AI, etc.
You think about latency, failure modes, observability and cost
You have strong opinions about what should not use an LLM
You can take an ambiguous business problem and turn it into something working
You can lead a couple of engineers without becoming a full-time manager
You are ridiculously hands-on
What I don’t want:
Someone whose main skill is managing Jira
Someone trying to graduate out of coding
“AI consultants” whose experience is mostly prompting ChatGPT
People who want to architect a 12-service distributed system before we have 1,000 users
People obsessed with whichever agent framework is fashionable this month
People who need a PRD telling them exactly what to build
One thing I care about a lot is technical investment judgement.
New models and AI products come out constantly.
I want someone capable of saying:
“This new capability could reduce X workflow from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. It would take us three days to prototype, cost approximately $Y/user, these are the failure modes, and this is how we should test whether it’s worth deploying.”
Rather than:
“This new model looks cool, we should use it.”
The hiring process will be practical.
I’ll probably give shortlisted people a messy real-world architecture problem involving customer data + CRM + agents + human workflows and spend most of the interview discussing how you’d approach it.
I care significantly more about things you have built and how you think than degrees, FAANG logos or certifications.
Could be titled AI Systems Lead / Founding AI Engineer / Head of AI Systems depending on seniority.
Remote.
If this sounds like you, DM me with:
What you’ve built
Your GitHub / portfolio / demos if available
The most complicated AI system you’ve shipped
One AI architecture decision you got wrong and what you learned from it
Location/timezone
Compensation expectations
Please don’t send me a generic cover letter.
I’d much rather receive:
“Here are three things I built. Here’s how they work. Here’s what broke.”
ANNUAL SALARY BUDGET : 22-30LPA, depending on experience