Company
Sylvan Labs
Annual salary
$250k – $350k/yr
Location
New York, NY
Listed
46d ago
- Experience:
- 5 to 12 years
- Workplace:
- 5 days in-office in New York, NY
- Equity:
- Competitive equity
On-site in New York, NY.
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About this Role
We are looking for a Founding Engineering Lead with 5+ years of engineering experience to join Sylvan Labs as the technical backbone of our engineering org. You'll be a hands-on builder (75% IC) shipping product enhancements that take our platform from early traction to self-serve scale, while providing technical mentorship and leadership (25%) to a small pod of engineers, with a clear path to Head of Engineering / VP of Engineering.
What you need
- 5+ years of engineering experience with no more than ~3 years in pure management, must be actively shipping code today
- Deeply AI-native: has built custom agent-driven development workflows, uses multi-agent orchestration, and can walk through their current dev setup in detail
- Strong applied ML fundamentals, understands classical ML algorithms, data science workflows, and can hold informed opinions on LLM training and transformer architectures
- Full-stack capable (React, Next.js, Python, Node.js) with a backend lean, red flag if they only want to do one side
- Based in or willing to relocate to New York City; must work on-site full-time
What will you be doing?
Shipping product enhancements end-to-end to move the platform from founder-led delivery to a scalable, self-serve motion
Owning technical architecture decisions and re-architecting existing systems alongside the CTO
Using AI agents and building custom development harnesses to maximize engineering velocity
Leading a pod of 2-3 engineers, providing technical mentorship, sprint scoping, and eventually people management
Shaping the ML and product roadmap, including longer-term plans around custom model training and agentic pipelines
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Founding Engineering Lead (US) role at Sylvan Labs? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Sylvan Labs role pay? +
The listing gives $250k – $350k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as New York, NY. 5 days in-office in New York, NY.
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