Tech Lead ($220K+ base salary)

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.

Experience
3+ years

Work arrangement
No