Engineering Team Lead

Who are we?

Fuel is building the first multi-agent platform for finance, automating the work of the CFO office with AI. Founded in 2021 as a finance-as-a-service company that ran finance for businesses with over $1B in combined P&L, Fuel rebuilt itself around agents in 2026. Backed by Markus Villig (Bolt), John S. Kim (SendBird), Stratmind, and Bad Ideas.

fuelfinance.me

www.instagram.com/fuelfinance

youtu.be/eI5VH2Ks9o4

Who are we searching for?

We're looking for an Engineering Team Lead to build and lead a new engineering team working on a new enterprise product line on top of the Fuelfinance AI finance platform.

This is a player-coach role: roughly half of your time is hands-on engineering, the other half is leading - architecture, planning, hiring, and growing people. You start with a team of one senior engineer and help hire the rest. You are the technical decision-maker for this direction and are accountable for what it ships.

The team

You'll build a new team inside R&D. You'll report to the Head of Engineering and work closely with the core product team (5 engineers, 1 QA), the Product Director, and the C-level team.

What will you build?

• A new enterprise product line on top of the Fuelfinance platform (details are shared during the interview process)
• The architecture that lets it reuse and extend the core platform: AI finance agents, MCP infrastructure and agent orchestration, integrations with accounting platforms, banks, and payment systems (QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe), access controls, and reporting
• The team itself: hiring, onboarding, engineering practices, and standards

What are your responsibilities?

• Lead a small engineering team as a player-coach - ~50% hands-on coding and reviews, ~50% architecture, planning, and people
• Own the architecture of the product line - make and defend design decisions, keep them aligned with the core platform, drive System Design Reviews
• Own delivery and be accountable for outcomes - plan, estimate, raise risks early, ship fast without cutting corners that matter
• Hold the quality bar - testing strategy, code review standards, observability, and incident response are your responsibility
• Hire and grow the team - take part in hiring, run 1:1s, give regular feedback, develop engineers along our seniority grading
• Be a product partner - work directly with the Product Director and stakeholders, understand customer problems, push back on scope when needed
• Set the standard for AI-native engineering - agentic coding workflows, proper codebase context, end-to-end verification - and make it the team's default
• Keep security and data integrity at the core of everything - we handle customers' financial data
• Protect the team's culture - ownership, direct communication, honest feedback

What are the preferred requirements for the role?

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading a team with real accountability for delivery
• Experience building products or systems from scratch and taking them to production with a small team
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development (a must) - not just chat-based usage: you build agentic coding workflows, feed the right codebase context to models, and verify AI output with end-to-end testing
• Proficiency in both frontend and backend development
• TypeScript, Node.js (Nest.js), React
• SQL, MongoDB
• AWS knowledge
• Strong system design skills - you design for scale, security, and maintainability and can explain trade-offs to non-engineers
• Experience hiring and mentoring engineers
• Experience enhancing system and infrastructure security
• B2/C1 English level
• Comfortable with startup mode: shifting priorities, fast pace, high ownership

Will be a plus:

• Experience with LLM APIs in production (Anthropic, OpenAI), RAG, agents, or evals
• Fintech background or experience on security-focused projects
• Knowledge of one of the following: Go, Python
• Early-stage startup experience
• Experience with infrastructure setup

Recruitment Process:

• CV & Cover Letter check
• Soft skills interview
• System Design & Experience Review
• Leadership & Management interview
• Culture fit interview

Why work with us?

• Build a new product line from day one - architecture, team, and practices are yours to shape
• Real leadership scope early - you own a direction and work directly with the Product Director and C-level
• Build the future of finance work - design AI-native finance products, not just maintain them
• Rapid skills improvement
• Growth opportunities according to our seniority grading (it comes with a compensation increase)
• Flexible schedule and time-off policy
• 18 days of paid vacation per year, paid sick leaves