Senior AI Software Engineer — Architecture & Product Ownership (User Acquisition) – No Agencies

# Senior AI Software Engineer — Architecture & Product Ownership ## TL;DR If you are a hands-on engineer who takes ownership, cares about business outcomes, and is willing to stake part of your compensation on product performance, you might be in the right place. We do not need an expert in everything. We need an expert at getting things done—quickly, cleanly, and convincingly. You should learn fast, ask the right questions, communicate clearly, and take responsibility for results. You should bring strong knowledge of software architecture and agentic development, solid full-stack capabilities, and the judgment to know when to build directly, when to delegate to AI agents, and when to challenge the direction entirely. You will work closely with the CTO and other engineers, contribute to—and often own—architectural decisions, and help turn ambiguous user-acquisition problems into production systems that generate measurable value. ## About the Role We are looking for a senior, hands-on AI Software Engineer to help design and build the next generation of agentic systems for user acquisition. This is not a traditional position where you receive isolated tickets, implement them, and move on. You will own outcomes: understanding the business problem, challenging assumptions, contributing to the architecture, coordinating execution across people and AI coding agents, delivering the solution, and validating that it improves performance. You will work closely with the CTO and other engineers to architect reliable, maintainable, and scalable systems. You will be expected to contribute to—and often own—architectural decisions, identify risks and tradeoffs, and help the team make sound technical choices. You will then determine the most effective way to turn those decisions into working software using the development tools at our disposal. In practice, this means treating AI coding agents as an extension of your internal engineering team: directing them effectively, reviewing their work critically, and taking full ownership of the final result. You will work across agentic AI systems, backend services, APIs, databases, and customer-facing applications. When necessary, you will investigate data directly, perform analysis, and use your findings to improve products and business results. You may also take direct technical ownership of specific client relationships, working with client stakeholders and internal leadership to translate business needs into reliable, high-performing systems. We need someone who cares about the complete product—not only their assigned portion of the codebase. The right person will be vocal in meetings, curious about the business, comfortable with ambiguity, and motivated to become an expert in user acquisition. ## What You Will Do * Work with the CTO and other engineers to architect agentic user-acquisition systems. * Contribute to—and often own—architectural decisions involving system boundaries, interfaces, data models, reliability, security, scalability, and long-term maintainability. * Turn ambiguous business and client objectives into clear technical strategies, milestones, and deliverables. * Build and evolve AI agents, orchestration workflows, backend services, APIs, database-backed applications, and full-stack product capabilities. * Determine the most effective way to implement systems using the development tools and resources available. * Treat AI coding agents as an extension of your engineering team by directing their work, providing sufficient context, reviewing their output, and taking ownership of the result. * Design effective data models and work directly with relational and analytical databases. * Investigate data and perform practical analysis when needed to understand performance, diagnose problems, and identify opportunities. * Determine where AI-driven execution is appropriate and where deterministic software, validation, or human oversight is required. * Review AI-generated work for correctness, security, maintainability, and architectural consistency. * Help establish architectural patterns and engineering standards that allow the team to move quickly without compromising long-term system quality. * Own initiatives from discovery through architecture, implementation, deployment, monitoring, measurement, and iteration. * Connect engineering work to measurable improvements in revenue, profitability, operational efficiency, or client performance. * Identify technical risks, hidden dependencies, unclear requirements, and delivery problems before they become blockers. * Participate actively in product, engineering, architectural, and client discussions. * Ask questions, challenge assumptions, explain tradeoffs, and propose concrete solutions. * Work directly with clients to understand their operations, explain technical decisions, manage expectations, and maintain trusted relationships. * Develop a deep understanding of user acquisition, campaign performance, operational workflows, and the business decisions our systems support. * Coordinate work across engineers and AI agents while maintaining visibility into scope, timelines, risks, and expected outcomes. * Evaluate results after release and take responsibility for improving systems that do not perform as expected. ## What We Are Looking For * Strong experience designing and contributing to the architecture of complex production software systems. * Excellent software-engineering fundamentals and the technical depth required to evaluate architectural tradeoffs. * The ability to take ownership of architectural decisions while collaborating effectively with the CTO and other engineers. * The ability to defend technical recommendations constructively and adapt decisions when presented with stronger evidence. * Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems, LLM-powered applications, or AI orchestration workflows. * Strong backend engineering experience, ideally with Python and API-driven architectures. * Solid full-stack knowledge and the ability to understand and contribute across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and data. * Strong experience designing database schemas, queries, and data models. * The ability to investigate data, test hypotheses, and translate analysis into product or operational improvements. * A strong understanding of reliability, observability, security, testing, and production operations. * The ability to distinguish a convincing prototype from a reliable production system. * Experience using AI coding agents as part of a disciplined engineering workflow. * The ability to plan, delegate, review, and integrate work produced by AI coding agents. * Strong product judgment and the ability to connect technical decisions to commercial outcomes. * Excellent written and verbal communication skills. * The confidence to communicate directly with executives, clients, product stakeholders, and engineers. * Strong planning and organizational skills, including the ability to manage priorities, dependencies, risks, and timelines. * A demonstrated tendency to take ownership without waiting for complete instructions. * The ability to learn unfamiliar industries and systems quickly and develop meaningful domain expertise. ## What Will Make You Stand Out * Experience building multi-agent systems or production workflows involving tool use, memory, planning, evaluation, and human oversight. * Experience leading engineers, managing projects, coordinating timelines, and taking ownership of delivery and outcomes. * Experience owning the technical side of a client relationship. * Experience working in a startup or another environment where priorities evolve quickly and individual ownership matters. * Experience designing systems that combine probabilistic AI behavior with deterministic business processes. * Experience with user acquisition, advertising technology, campaign optimization, attribution, performance marketing, or analytics. * Experience with Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, AWS, and modern TypeScript or React frameworks. * Strong SQL skills and experience using data analysis to improve commercial performance. * Experience helping establish architectural standards across multiple products or engineering teams. ## Compensation and Performance This role includes an agreed-upon base compensation complemented by meaningful performance-based bonuses. Our objective is straightforward: build products and systems that improve performance and make the company more profitable. When your work creates measurable value, we want your compensation to grow proportionally with that value. The performance component will be based on clearly defined and mutually agreed-upon objectives. These may include product performance, revenue or profitability improvements, successful delivery, operational efficiency, client outcomes, or other measurable contributions within your area of ownership. The structure will remain flexible and may evolve as your responsibilities and impact grow. This creates meaningful upside for someone who is confident in their ability to deliver—not just complete tasks. We are looking for someone willing to put real weight behind their ideas and take accountability for the results. If you want compensation to be based entirely on time, seniority, or completed tickets, this is unlikely to be the right position. If you want your upside to grow with the value you create, it may be an excellent fit. ## How We Think About Engineering AI is changing what makes an engineer valuable. Writing code remains important, but implementation speed alone is no longer enough. We value engineers who can: * Understand what should be built and why. * Architect systems that remain coherent as they evolve. * Collaborate productively on difficult technical decisions. * Direct both people and AI agents effectively. * Critically validate AI-generated work. * Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders. * Understand the business domain behind the software. * Use data to determine whether their work is producing results. * Take responsibility for measurable outcomes rather than completed tasks. We are looking for someone who combines strong architectural judgment, hands-on engineering ability, the curiosity of a product thinker, and the ownership of a technical leader. ## What Success Looks Like Within your first several months, you will be expected to: * Develop a strong understanding of our user-acquisition systems, business model, and client workflows. * Become a trusted architectural partner to the CTO and engineering team. * Take architectural ownership of appropriate initiatives and contribute meaningfully to the architecture of the broader platform. * Independently transform unclear requirements into sound technical proposals. * Deliver production capabilities using a combination of direct engineering work and AI-assisted execution. * Effectively direct AI coding agents while remaining accountable for the quality and completeness of their output. * Use data to evaluate whether those capabilities are improving performance. * Improve the reliability, maintainability, and coherence of the systems you touch. * Communicate effectively across engineering, leadership, and client teams. * Demonstrate a measurable positive effect on product performance, operational efficiency, client outcomes, or profitability. * Become someone we can trust with an important business outcome—not merely a list of development tasks. ## How to Apply Tell us about one system you architected or substantially influenced. Explain the business objective, the most important architectural tradeoff you made, your specific contribution, and how you determined whether the system produced the intended result. Please include the exact phrase **“marvelious architectural coherence,” including the intentional typo,** naturally in your response so we know you read the complete description. You are welcome to use AI tools. However, your response must reflect your own experience and judgment, and you should be prepared to discuss every decision in detail during the interview. Please also indicate: * The base compensation you are seeking. * The total compensation you would expect when performance-based compensation is included. * The rationale behind the compensation you're asking for. Please be realistic and transparent. Applications will undergo automated screening before selected candidates proceed to multiple interview rounds. Only candidates under serious consideration will be invited to complete the full interview process. We're aiming for a two-month contract with the potential to extend if performance is good. The contract will end early if we decide that the fit is not correct, and you'll be paid pro rata for the time spent.