Founding Engineering Lead

Location: MakatiWork setup: Hybrid, three days onsite and two days remoteAbout CompanyWe are hiring on behalf of an early-stage AI company building an enterprise customer-experience platform for Southeast Asia. The company already has enterprise customers and a growing pipeline of new use cases. The next stage is turning early customer deployments into a repeatable, scalable platform that can support more clients without rebuilding the system each time.This will be the company’s senior-most software engineering role. You will report directly to the CEO and own how the technology is built: architecture, delivery, production reliability, engineering standards, and the team behind it.The title comes with leadership responsibility, but this is still a hands-on builder role. Expect to spend approximately half of your week designing systems, reviewing code, pairing with engineers, and writing production code yourself.As the company scales, this role is intended to grow toward CTO-level ownership.What you will ownArchitectureYou will decide how the platform should evolve, including system boundaries, infrastructure, technical standards, and build-versus-buy decisions. A major early priority is turning enterprise onboarding from a largely client-specific process into a repeatable platform capability.DeliveryYou will translate commercial and product priorities into realistic technical scope, sequence the work, and remain accountable for what reaches production.ProductionThe platform operates under enterprise service-level commitments. Uptime, latency, security, and incident response will be part of your ownership. There is not yet a mature on-call structure. You will help design one that protects customers without leaving a single engineer carrying every incident.AI and model systemsYou will guide the selection and evaluation of the speech and language models used by the platform. You will also help build the evaluation systems needed to determine whether changes to prompts, models, retrieval, or orchestration genuinely improve the product.The engineering teamYou will initially work with a small team of engineers, many of whom are still early in their careers. You will raise their technical level through pairing, code review, architecture discussions, and clear engineering standards. You are also expected to hire approximately three to five additional engineers over the next year.Product and enterprise customersYou will have direct influence on what gets built rather than receiving a finished specification.You will also join technical conversations with enterprise customers, particularly when discussing integrations, architecture, security, deployment constraints, and production commitments.The current technology environmentBackend: Python, FastAPIFrontend: TypeScript, Next.jsCloud and infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, containerized servicesTelephony: SIP, SIP trunks, SBCs, and live voice infrastructureAI systems: Agentic workflows, RAG, speech and language models, AI governance, evaluation, and securityWhat we are looking forYou should bring:At least 7 years of professional software-engineering experience.Ownership of delivery for a software product, engineering team, or major technical area.Deep backend or full-stack experience, with production systems you can discuss in detail.Recent hands-on coding experience. You should have shipped production software within the last year.Experience designing or materially redesigning cloud infrastructure and container orchestration.Personal responsibility for production reliability, incidents, and customer-facing service levels.Experience mentoring engineers earlier in their careers.Confidence discussing architecture, integrations, security, and technical trade-offs with enterprise customers.The judgment to distinguish reusable platform capabilities from one-off customer requests.Comfort working in a seed-stage environment where priorities may evolve as the company learns.Particularly relevant experienceAny of the following would be valuable:Real-time or low-latency systems.Voice infrastructure, SIP, VoIP, WebRTC, CPaaS, or contact-center technology.Conversational AI or production LLM products.Agentic AI and retrieval-augmented generation systems.B2B SaaS or enterprise platform products.Multi-tenant or isolated enterprise deployment environments.Enterprise security, compliance, or regulated-industry customers.Building an engineering function from an early stage.This role may not suit you ifYou want to stop writing code.You prefer inheriting an established engineering organization.You need several layers of technical management above you.You want architecture ownership without production accountability.You prefer internal-only work and do not want to speak directly with customers.You are looking for a role centred on status reporting rather than shipping.