AI Acquisition

Founding Director of Engineering - AI-Native Venture Studio

United States · Director · Contract

Sponsorship not specified$15k-$40kDetected 2 days ago

Code ReviewLLMsRAGAgentic AILangGraphAI OrchestrationLogisticsLeadership

About the role

Why this is one of the best seats in AI right now We're an AI-native venture studio.
Our operating model is humans and AI coding agents on one board: work gets assigned to agents like teammates, and a small team ships what used to take a big one.
You'd be the person who makes that machine run across the portfolio.

We start as a paid engagement - the best leaders we hire often run their own thing and we respect that - and it grows into whatever's right for both of us: bigger scope, a real stake.
How do you set it up?" Hit team + agent orchestration, the standards/guardrails you'd install, your architecture and build-vs-buy-vs-agent calls, what you'd cut, and your honest weakest point. (Some of this is deliberately underspecified - make calls and state your assumptions.)
we'll be direct, we'll change a requirement on you mid-conversation, we'll have you whiteboard or build something small live, and we'll push hard on your thinking.
If a recorded video isn't your style (some who run their own thing prefer not to), tell the recruiter - we'll do a live equivalent or jump to a short paid build.
Where you land in that range is about the tier you hit - a true player-coach who leads PMs and orchestrates agents across products sits at the top - not where you live.
If you'd rather build alone than get leverage through a team and agents, this isn't it either.

You can take a fulfillment gap and see the revenue model, not just the bug.
You can take a punch and throw one.
You can name what you started using in the last two weeks and why.
This matters more than your résumé or degree (some of our best people have non-CS backgrounds).

Real scope, real ownership.
No budget cap for tokens, no babysitting.
Best-in-class tooling, frontier models, every AI coding harness and agent framework you want - and nobody counting your tokens.
If you've been throttled by a $20 plan while doing real work, that ends here.
You report to a CPO/CTO who is genuinely excellent and hands-on
you'll get sharper fast, and you'll have the air cover to move.
Frontier work, not maintenance.
You'll work with the newest models and harnesses the week they drop.

roughly $15,000-$40,000 / month USD (~$180K-$480K annualized), contractor, paid monthly and on time.
We pay for the talent tier, not the postal code, and there's real upside on what you own.

Flexible to start; the strongest engagements grow into primary over time.
How to apply No long form, no unpaid take-home busywork.
We want to see what you've built and how you lead - a tight Loom (keep the recording under ~15 min; think as long as you like): Show us something real you led or built - a product you founded/led, a team you built, an agent system you shipped.
Walk us through the hardest problem, the calls you made, and where it still breaks.
Live links we can poke at are ideal.

This listing is sourced directly from AI Acquisition's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.