Tech Lead (US)

I'm Arkadiy, co-founder and CTO of Leaping AI. We build voice and SMS AI agents for home improvement companies. Every appointment we book by phone is worth $20k+ for them, generating millions of new revenue for our customers.

We were top 1% of our YC batch by growth. Closed an oversubscribed $4.7M seed in 3 days. We doubled ARR in the first half of 2026 and are aiming to double it again by year end. Current technical team consists of 3 engineers + me.

The role

Lead engineering and report to me. I want to spend less time on code reviews and running the eng team, and instead talk more to customers to understand the product bottlenecks and its next evolution.

• Lead the engineering team, review code, own team output

• Make architectural decisions (latency-critical distributed system)

• Set up engineering best practices and processes, mentoring

• Task prioritization to support business objectives

• Contribute to the codebase yourself (20-30% of your time)

• Hire >10 engineers over the next 12 months

The technical problem

• Scale and latency. We handle ~3M phone calls a month. We need to be able to grow that exponentially while holding p95 end-to-end latency under 1 second.

• From calls to an operating system. Phone calls and SMS are the atoms that are tied by the long-running campaigns. The goal is an operating system for home improvement and adjacent industries with a CRM expansion.

• Self-improving agents. An agent that watches the voice agents, proposes changes, A/B tests them automatically against live traffic, and promotes or rejects the change. A closed loop with humans only at the edges.

You

• Led a team of 4+ engineers at a fast-growing startup

• See the eng org as a system: find the bottleneck, fix it, find the next one

• Excellent people skills. You enjoy coordinating and talking to people.

• Curiosity and attention to detail

• Passion for building elegant, performant, agentic, latency-critical distributed systems (so many buzzwords, I know)

First 30/60/90 Days

• 0-30: You've paired with me on code reviews and architecture calls. You've shipped code across our voice service, backend, and frontend, so you know the system first-hand. You've had a 1:1 with every engineer and FDE.

• 30-60: You collaborate with me on the eng roadmap and own its execution. I've stopped reviewing most code. Dev productivity and system observability have measurably improved.

• 60-90: Engineering runs without me in the loop day-to-day, and I'm spending that time with customers. You're leading a new product expansion. You hold mentoring sessions with engineers.

How we work

• In person 4 days a week, California Street in SF with one WFH day.

• Stack: Python, Next.js, Postgres, Azure, Inngest, Twilio+Telnyx

About Arkadiy

In my previous life, I built infrastructure for DALL-E 2 and led an academic research team on autonomous extraterrestrial rovers, as well as worked on the computer vision team for autonomous trucking.

About the interview

• 30 minute informal call with CTO

• Whiteboard system design interview (real historical production problem)

• PR review interview (toy example)