Software Engineering Lead (Agentic AI)

• You’ll lead the engineering team building Tulip’s new agent-native app-building product — an effort that will redefine how customers compose, deploy, and operate apps on our platform, and you’ll ship something publicly within the first few months
• Own the technical architecture and delivery of Tulip’s new agent-native app-building product
• Hire, mentor, and grow a senior team capable of operating with high autonomy and quality from day one
• Establish engineering standards: testing, observability, AI-driven development practices for the team
• Partner with Infrastructure and other Engineering teams to evolve Tulip’s API surface and runtime so agents have what they need without compromising the existing platform
• Collaborate deeply with product and design as a product threaded team, with shared ownership of outcomes
• Cultivate an AI-first development culture and continuously raise the bar on velocity and quality
• Key Collaborators:
• Product & Design
• Engineering leadership peers
• Infrastructure
• QA
• Tulip Customers and Customer-facing teams

Benefits

• Impactful Work: Have a direct impact on product and culture
• Work/Life Balance: Flexible work and unlimited vacation policy, virtual company events and happy hours
• Additional Perks: Commuter benefits, a work-from-home stipend, fitness subsidies
• Competitive Benefits: Healthcare, Dental, Vision, Short-term Disability, Long-term Disability, Health Reimbursement Account (HRA)
• Family-Friendly Policies: Parental Leave, 401K & Life Insurance
• Employee-Led Communities: Parents@Tulip, Hey Lady, Allies@Tulip and more- You bring high levels of technical acumen and people management skill, honed over years of building and delivering SaaS products, and you’re energized by the chance to build at the edge of what AI models can do
• You have strong opinions about agent architectures, context management, and building scalable systems, and you’re passionate about mentoring engineers and helping them grow
• You’re a collaborative, motivated self-starter who leads from the front, brings your authentic self to work, and wants to help shape how this team operates as a reference point for AI-driven development across the broader engineering org
• 7-8+ years experience in software engineering, with experience building and scaling large SaaS products and complex distributed systems
• Hands-on experience architecting systems that integrate agentic and generative AI capabilities, including tool use, context management, sandboxed execution, and long-running workflows
• Expertise in contemporary tech stacks including React, Node.js, MongoDB, and Postgres, with experience deploying in multi-cloud and multi-tenant environments
• Experience building and scaling AI systems in production, including LLM fine-tuning and evaluation, agent orchestration and context management, retrieval pipelines and vector stores, tool invocation and MCPs, guardrails and safety layers, and end-to-end observability for non-deterministic systems
• 2-3+ years of experience leading software development teams with strong hands-on technical leadership, architecting solutions, and staying close to the code
• Cross-functional leadership with product, design, and customer-facing teams to deliver features end-to-end
• Strong product-engineering instincts: you can prototype quickly, prune scope, and decide what to ship versus what to throw away