Technical Lead, Software Development, Backend Developer

About the Role

A1 is building a proactive AI system that carries work forward across conversations, tools, and time.

As Technical Lead, Applications, you directly own the core application architecture that connects AI systems to real-world user experiences. You are responsible for the design, reliability, and evolution of backend services, APIs, and client integrations across mobile and desktop.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.
• Ensure production‑grade reliability: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.
• Set the architectural direction for AI‑powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.
• Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behavior, and graceful failure modes.
• Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.
• Make high‑impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.
• Establish a strong execution culture through code reviews, design reviews, and hands‑on technical leadership.
• Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.
• Balance speed and discipline – shipping quickly without compromising long‑term system quality.

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.
• Strong hands‑on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.
• Experience delivering AI‑powered products, with a deep understanding of model integration trade‑offs.
• Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.
• Comfort operating across platforms (backend, mobile, desktop), even if your depth is in one.
• Proven ability to make high‑impact technical decisions under ambiguity.
• A strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real‑world usage.
• Move fast without breaking fundamentals.

• Production systems are observable, monitored, and stable under real‑world load.
• Decisions consistently balance speed, cost, reliability, and user experience.
• Features across backend, mobile, and desktop work smoothly and reliably.
• Latency and reliability improve measurably over time.