AI Code Engineering Lead
Madhive is the leading independent and fully customizable operating system built to help local media professionals build profitable, differentiated, and efficient businesses. Madhive empowers sales teams to extend their reach into streaming and connects local advertisers with the communities they serve. Madhive’s platform provides the unique ability to reach local audiences at national scale, with premium supply partnerships and end-to-end tools for planning, targeting, and measuring full-funnel campaign outcomes. Powering campaigns for over 30,000 small and medium businesses per day, Madhive is driving the evolution of local media.
AI Code Engineering Lead
Madhive is seeking an AI Code Engineering Lead to make our engineering dramatically faster with AI-native practice and tooling. Madhive is an R&D company; engineering velocity is the leverage point.
You'll build and scale our agentic coding platform - the tooling and workflows that let AI generate production code with engineers reviewing rather than writing it. This is a hands-on role: you'll work directly with engineering teams to ship acceleration fast, then turn what works into reusable building blocks the whole org can use. You'll lead through technical credibility and influence.
This is a hybrid role, working 3 days a week at Madhive HQ in the Financial District of New York City.
Key Responsibilities
Own AI-native engineering practice, the eval harness, reusable AI building blocks, and developer tooling that dramatically raise output.
Manage a portfolio of velocity V1s, ensuring each is integrated into the CTO’s org (which owns architecture, delivery, and V2).
Facilitate smooth handoffs to the engineering organization; ensure every acceleration V1 lands in the CTO’s org with a named owner identified upfront.
Codify what works into reusable "golden path" playbooks - deployment patterns, connector and building-block templates, evaluation frameworks, and observability standards - and feed field learnings back to platform teams so wins compound across the org.
What You’ll Bring
Technical Excellence: A builder who clears a staff-engineer bar (10+ years experience) at a strong company and still wants to ship. You have a history of shipping production code at staff scope.
Adoption Leadership: Evidence of driving adoption of at least one engineering practice or tool to org-wide scale through Product & Engineering organizations.
Tool Fluency: Expertise in agentic coding tools across the full SDLC (AI coding agents, eval/observability frameworks, CI/CD, testing). Experience building or running an eval harness is essential.
Mindset: Grit in ambiguous problems and curiosity about business mechanics. You reason rigorously about how AI can inflate output and design specifically against stability risks.
Eval Rigor: Hands-on with evaluation-driven development - precision/recall benchmarks, human review queues, and audit trails - not just standing up an eval harness.
How Success is Measured
North Star: The share of eligible shipped code produced end-to-end by autonomous AI workflows, rising cycle over cycle.
Supporting Metrics: Delivery velocity (deploy frequency, lead time) and developer experience.
Guardrail: A quality/stability bar (e.g., code churn and change-fail rate) held at or below the human-only baseline.
Eligibility: Autonomous output counts only where policy allows and after normal engineering acceptance.
Location / Work Model
Hybrid, NYC - 3 days in office, with travel to other Madhive locations as needed.
The approximate compensation range for this position is $200,000-$225,000. The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be determined by a number of factors, including the applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity among our team.
We are Madhive
Madhive is a dynamic, diverse, innovative, and friendly place to work. We embrace our differences and believe they fuel our creativity. We come from varied backgrounds and think that’s important. Whether it’s taking ideas from previous lives and applying them in different ways or creating something completely new, we are all trail-blazing team players who think big and want to make an impact.
We are committed to cultivating a culture of inclusion and collaboration. We welcome diversity in education, culture, opinions, race, ethnicity, gender identity, veteran status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and beliefs.
Please be advised that we will NOT be using third-party recruiting agencies for this search.