The Role
We're looking for a Lead Engineer to own our core platform architecture and drive it from early product to production scale. You'll be the senior technical voice in the room: designing systems, shipping code daily, and setting the engineering standards the team grows into. This is a builder's role, hands-on keyboard, not a management-only seat.
Because we're a startup, we're flexible on how we start working together. We're open to a contract-to-hire arrangement or a bootstrap-style engagement, and a full-time opportunity with equity is on the table for the right talent.
What You'll Do
- Architect, build, and ship the core data-activation pipeline: first-party data ingestion, normalization, deterministic identity resolution, audience segmentation, and activation
- Design and deploy agentic AI systems as first-class parts of the product, including our Signals Agent and AdCP integration, so external planning and buying agents can discover and activate KYBER1 audiences directly
- Build the trust layer that makes it safe to put agents near valuable data: PII gating, access control on every agent query, and honest, reported match rates as a proof metric
- Own technical direction: make pragmatic build-vs-buy-vs-partner calls, set coding and review standards, and keep the stack simple enough to move fast
- Work directly with founders to translate product and commercial goals into technical roadmaps
- Wear many hats: infrastructure, backend, integrations (DSPs, clean rooms, retailer data systems), but you will have support building a team as we grow
- Use agents as leverage inside the business, engineering, data normalization, reporting, operations, and help hire and mentor the engineers who come after you
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least some of that in a senior, lead, or founding-engineer capacity
- Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems, multi-step LLM workflows, tool use / function calling, agent orchestration frameworks, or autonomous pipelines in production
- Strong backend and distributed-systems fundamentals: APIs, event-driven architectures, data stores, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Ad tech experience is a highly desirable, programmatic advertising, RTB, DSP/SSP integrations, attribution, or retail/commerce media
- Experience with data-heavy systems is a strong plus, identity resolution, audience data, CDPs, clean rooms, privacy-safe data handling, or large-scale ETL/normalization pipelines
- Startup DNA: comfortable with ambiguity, biased toward shipping, and able to make good decisions with incomplete information
- Collaborative by nature: comfortable pitching in outside your lane, and just as invested in the team's wins as your own
- Clear communicator who can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
- Willingness to start on a contract-to-hire or bootstrap basis, with the intent and appetite to convert to a full-time leadership role as the company grows
Nice to Have
- Experience taking a product from zero to one at an early-stage company
- Familiarity with the modern AI stack: LLM APIs, vector databases, RAG pipelines, evaluation and observability tooling
- Prior exposure to high-throughput, low-latency systems (ad serving, bidding, streaming data)
- Familiarity with emerging agentic ad standards such as the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP)
What We Offer
- A ground-floor seat at a commerce media startup where your architecture becomes the company's foundation
- Flexible engagement to start (contract-to-hire or bootstrap), with a full-time offer, including equity, competitive salary, health benefits, unlimited PTO and fully remote
- Direct access to founders and real influence over product and technical strategy
- A genuinely agent-native way of working: high leverage, low bureaucracy, and a standard we hold everywhere, assume an agent is on the other side, and that it is choosing whom to trust
