Founding Director of Engineering (Remote)

We build many products at once with small teams of humans + AI coding agents. You run that engine , you lead the product managers, orchestrate the agent fleets, set the technical bar, and still ship code yourself. Player-coach, not a hands-off manager.

We're an AI-native venture studio. We stand up new software products , our own and for clients , fast, on top of an in-house agent platform (per-chat sandboxes that scaffold, build, test, deploy and database whole apps; subagents; MCP/skills).

What you get here that you won't get most places:

• Real scope, real ownership. You own delivery across multiple products, lead the PMs/builders who run them, and are the technical truth-source the team ladders up to.
• No budget cap for tokens, no babysitting. Best-in-class tooling, frontier models, every AI coding harness and agent framework you want , and nobody counting your tokens.
• A brilliant CTO to build alongside. You report to a CPO/CTO who is genuinely excellent and hands-on; you'll get sharper fast, and you'll have the air cover to move.
• Frontier work, not maintenance. Agentic systems, net-new products, an internal platform that builds other products.
• Top-of-market pay, paid properly and on time.

What you'll actually do:

• Lead the product managers / builder-leads. Each owns a product or venture; you set direction, unblock, review, and raise their tempo and quality.
• Orchestrate humans + AI agents. Break product bets into work for people and for agent fleets, decide what's an agent job vs. deterministic code, and get correct, shipped output back.
• Stay hands-on. You still architect and write code , the hardest plumbing, the risky spikes, the reference implementations.
• Own the portfolio's delivery. Multiple products shipping in parallel, fast, without it turning to mush.
• Set the standards that let a small team ship safely at speed , CI, review, evals, security and logging conventions, the guardrails that keep quality high while agents and people ship weekly.
• Reason commercially. Figure out why a product or funnel isn't working from first principles, and fix the real cause.

Requirements:

• You're a player-coach. You lead people and you still ship.
• You're an agentic-engineering native. You don't just use AI , you build with it at the systems level: agents, memory, tools, orchestration, evals, failure modes.
• You get leverage through others. You've led engineers and/or product managers and gotten a team (or a fleet of agents) to produce far more than you could alone.
• You've shipped, fast, more than once. Ideally you've founded or led 0→1 products.
• You see the whole board. Technical, but you reason about the business and the user.
• You're right, and so is your team's work. You install the standards that mean shipped work is tested and works.
• You're high-agency. Drop you a one-line product bet and you make sensible calls, document assumptions, and ship.

Signals we screen for:

• You've led an engineering and/or product team.
• Hands-on agentic depth , you build with LLMs and agent frameworks.
• A portfolio of shipped products.
• Commercial fluency.
• Range.

What this role is NOT:

• Not a hands-off manager.
• Not a pure IC.
• Not a process/ceremony role.
• Not a place that needs all-nighters.

Benefits:

• Compensation: roughly $15,000–$40,000 / month USD (~$180K–$480K annualized), contractor, paid monthly and on time.
• Logistics: Remote, anywhere with enough daily overlap to actually lead the team.