Lead AI Engineer

The Lead AI Engineer role at a US-based retention marketing agency is the first engineering hire for a team of about 12 (strategists, specialists, designers, copywriters, and ops). The company specializes in building personal relationships with customers at scale through email, SMS, and other owned channels.

The founder has already built a data layer pulling Klaviyo data into a Supabase database, AI skills and workflows for reporting, and a diagnostics tool for QAing client accounts. However, the current system is disorganized and unsustainable as the company scales.

What You'll Own

• Audit the existing architecture, define what stays and what gets rebuilt, and create a fully maintained, documented codebase with clear standards.

• Design data pipelines for ingestion from Klaviyo, Postscript, and Attentive, modeling and storage in Supabase, and querying beyond platform API limitations.

• Build agentic workflows across nearly every area of the business, including account diagnostics, reporting, QA, go-to-market, and internal ops.

• Evolve early products into scalable, client-reliable solutions and own integrations with email/SMS platforms.

• Set technical direction, standards, and practices for the engineering function as it grows.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with a track record of shipping products used by real people.

• Strong full-stack engineering skills in TypeScript and/or Python, modern backend and frontend, Cloudflare, Supabase/Postgres, and SQL.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure provisioning (AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Experience with CI/CD workflows.

• Hands-on experience building LLM-based systems, including agents, tool use, RAG, prompt and skill design.

• Strong data pipeline experience, including pulling data from third-party APIs, modeling, syncing, and querying.

• Comfortable owning data infrastructure end-to-end with Supabase/Postgres.

• Experience as the only or lead engineer in a team, with ability to scope, prioritize, ship, and maintain independently.

• Ownership mindset with accountability for delivered work.

• Proactive communicator with excellent written and verbal English for remote, async collaboration.

Preferred

• Experience with email/SMS marketing platforms (Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, Braze) or the DTC/ecommerce ecosystem.

• Background at a fast-moving martech or retention product company.

• Experience productizing internal tooling or turning agency workflows into software.

• Experience using AI coding tools (e.g., Codex, Claude Code).

• Product instinct with opinions on what should be built, not just how.

What Success Looks Like

• The architecture is audited, cleaned up, and documented, with a fully maintained codebase.

• Internal AI tooling is reliable and consistent across the team.

• Agentic workflows are built and maintained by engineering, not the founder.

• Early products move from prototype to scalable, client-reliable solutions.

• The founder focuses on product, clients, and growth, with engineering covered.

• The engineering function is ready to grow beyond one person.