Head of Engineering & AI (Hands-On Experience)

The Role
We're looking for a Head of Engineering & AI who builds. This is the person who writes the code, ships the features, and takes the AI systems behind Pulse from idea to production, with a small senior team working alongside them.

You'll spend most of your week in the codebase. Agents, orchestration, retrieval, evaluations, the APIs and pipelines underneath them. When something is broken or hard or nobody knows how to do it yet, you're the one who sits down and solves it.

The leadership part is real, but it happens through building. You set the standard by writing the code others read, you unblock people by pairing with them, and you make technical calls by having your hands in the system. If you're looking for a role where you stop coding and start coordinating, this isn't it.

What You'll Own
Shipping: You write production code every week and you ship. Features go out because you built them or because you cleared the path for someone else to. You measure yourself by what's live, not by what's planned.
The AI systems, hands-on: Agents, multi-agent orchestration, RAG and retrieval, evaluations, guardrails, cost and latency. You build these yourself. You know the foundational model landscape and its tradeoffs because you've tested them, not because you read about them.
Architecture that scales: You design the systems and then you implement them. Infrastructure, APIs, data pipelines, real-time campaign execution. You design for the next 12 months without over-building for a scale we don't have yet.
The bar for how we build: Code review, testing, CI/CD, observability. You set the standard by example and you hold it. Quality without bureaucracy.
Reliability: Global brands and major labels depend on what we build. You make sure it works, you know when it doesn't before the client does, and you fix the cause and not just the symptom.
Security: Security is part of building, not a review at the end. You own access control, secrets, dependency and supply chain risk, and how client and creator data is stored and handled. You also own the risks that come with agents: prompt injection, tool permissions, and data leaking through a model. Enterprise clients trust us with their campaigns, and that trust is only as strong as how we protect their data.
A small, senior team: You lead a handful of engineers by building with them. You pair, you review, you unblock, and you help them grow. You hire with a high bar as the team expands, but the team stays lean and every person on it ships, including you.
Product partnership: You work closely with the Founders and the product team. You push back when something doesn't make sense, you propose better paths, and you translate what customers need into what gets built.
AI-first by default: At Influur, AI isn't a tool you reach for occasionally, it's how we breathe. You lead by example and you make sure the whole team works the same way.
What We're Looking For
This role is for someone who has already built in the AI-native era of engineering, not someone who's catching up to it.

You're still writing code today, and you want to keep writing it
LLM-based products you personally built and shipped to production, not prototypes: agents, tool use, RAG, evals, and a clear view of model tradeoffs
Strong backend and systems fundamentals, you can go deep when it counts
Fluent across our stack: Node.js and TypeScript, Python, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines
Experience leading a small team as a tech lead, staff engineer or hands-on engineering lead, without stepping away from the code
Security-minded by default, you write code that protects client data and you understand the risks specific to agentic systems: prompt injection, tool permissions, data leakage
Data-oriented in how you decide and how you build, you instrument what matters and let the numbers guide the bets
Startup experience, you know how to bring structure without slowing things down
Speed with judgment, you know what to build fast and what to build right
Low ego, high output