Lead Engineer / Tech Lead, Applications

Tech Lead, Applications

About the Role

There are over 5 billion users using basic applications today such email, notes, tasks, calendar

and they’re not AI-native. Our mission is to build proactive applications for anyone in the world,

who are not used to complex prompting. We aim to bring intelligence to conversations, errands,

organising and workflows, with minimal to no prompting.

Our product focuses on achieving high reliability for long-running workflows, persistent context,

and real-world task completion. We believe products will greatly reduce hallucinations

Our objective is to organise anyone’s life, allowing us all to spend time on valuable and

meaningful things

As Technical Lead, AI Email App, you own the engineering layer that turns AI capability into a

reliable product. You will shape the architecture across backend services, APIs, and client

applications, while leading a small team of senior engineers.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural

decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.

What You’ll Own

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and
• desktop.
• Design reliable systems for AI-powered workflows, including state, orchestration, tool
• use, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.
• Build the APIs and abstractions that connect AI systems to real-world product
• experiences.
• Lead a small, senior engineering team and raise the technical bar through design
• reviews, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship.
• Make high-impact trade-offs across latency, reliability, cost, security, and user
• experience.
• Establish strong production foundations: observability, monitoring, testing, and
• operational excellence.
• Partner closely with ML leadership to turn model capabilities into robust, shippable
• product experiences.
• Move quickly while keeping the architecture simple, maintainable, and ready to scale.

What We’re Looking For

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in
• production.
• Experience building AI-powered products or systems that integrate with modern ML/LLM
• capabilities.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make decisions with incomplete information.
• Comfortable working across backend and client platforms, with deep expertise in at least
• one.
• A strong bias toward ownership, shipping, and learning from real-world usage.
• High standards for code quality, reliability, and engineering fundamentals.

Outcomes

• Production systems are observable, monitored, and stable under real-world load.
• Decisions consistently balance speed, cost, reliability, and user experience.
• Features across backend, mobile, and desktop work smoothly and reliably.
• Latency and reliability improve measurably over time.

How We Work

• We are a small, high-talent-density, hands-on team. Engineers have broad ownership and are
• expected to exercise strong judgment and execute independently.
• We make decisions quickly, work closely together, and balance speed with engineering
• fundamentals. We care less about process and more about building something exceptional.

Darwin Recruitment is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.

Veronica Gains