Engineer in AI agent development

We are looking for an experienced, hands–on senior developer to act as a deputy to CTO. You will own day–to–day engineering, work across the full stack, and lead how the team builds and debugs with AI agents. A technology, innovation, and consumer intelligence firm that advises global leaders on emerging science, technology, and market trends to drive smarter, more confident innovation decisions.

Act as the CTO’s stand-in for day–to–day engineering: make and own routine technical decisions when he is unavailable and represent his intent faithfully. Own the day–to–day individual contributor (IC) flow: pull request review and approval, unblocking engineers, and keeping work moving so decisions do not bottleneck on the CTO. Operate in tight, high–bandwidth alignment with the CTO. This role lives or dies on trust, so over–communicate, flag early, and keep no surprises.

Contribute to architecture and technical decisions across our next–generation platform, partnering with the CTO and platform architect on direction and tradeoffs. Bring a pragmatic, right–sized approach to the work: favor solutions that fit the real need over ones that overbuild for scale we will not operate at. “Done beats perfect.” Contribute directly across database, backend, frontend, and Dev Ops/infrastructure as the work demands.

Fill gaps wherever they open up. Prototype, build core components, and lead by example on quality. Champion and help establish a culture of agentic development across the engineering team, so AI agents are a core part of how we build, debug, and operate, not an occasional convenience. Set the standards, patterns, and guardrails for working with agents well (context and prompting practices, review and verification, where to trust them and where not) so the team’s output multiplies without quality dropping.

Use agents across the full lifecycle and the full stack: development, debugging and investigation across frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure, testing, and review. Bring the rest of the engineers up, so agentic practice becomes a shared team capability rather than a personal one. Raise the engineering bar: code review discipline, testing, CI/CD hygiene, and operational soundness across both established and greenfield systems.

Reduce key–person risk by spreading knowledge and ownership. Help turn product and research needs into a clear, sequenced plan of work. Partner closely with our platform architect, engineers, product, and research. Communicate clearly and proactively with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, across async and real‑time.

10+ years of software engineering experience at a senior, staff, or principal level, with significant hands–on depth you still exercise. Genuine, demonstrated breadth across the full stack: databases, backend services, frontend, and devops/cloud infrastructure. We need a strong generalist who can operate credibly in all of these, not a specialist in one. Strong system design and architecture judgment, with a pragmatic sense for right–sizing: choosing solutions that fit the need rather than over–engineering them.

A proven, trusted operator who can run with ambiguous direction and make sound calls the CTO would stand behind, without needing close supervision. Pragmatic and outcome–focused: you right‑size solutions instead of gold‑plating them, and you know what to do first. A real sparring partner: you push back, surface tradeoffs, and improve the decision rather than just executing it. High integrity and reliability.

You are the kind of person someone can hand something to and stop worrying about it. Able to commit full–time and operate as an embedded team member, with at least three hours of daily overlap with…