Lead AI Engineer

HILBERT IS BUILDING A REASONING ENGINE THAT MUST NAVIGATE NON-DETERMINISTIC USER BEHAVIOR ACROSS DATA SILOS — TURNING MONTHS-LONG DECISION CYCLES INTO MINUTES. FULLY AGENTIC BY DESIGN, OUR DEMAND INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM DOESN'T JUST CALL APIS; IT SOLVES THE HARD PROBLEM OF ORCHESTRATING MULTI-STEP INFERENCE OVER MESSY, HIGH-STAKES ENTERPRISE DATA WHERE DETERMINISTIC ANSWERS DON'T EXIST. We're looking for a Lead AI Engineer who can own the technical direction of Hilbert's AI stack, ship production-grade systems hands-on, and elevate a growing engineering team — all with the ownership and urgency of a founder. This is not a "manage from a distance" role. You'll write code, make architecture calls, set the bar for quality and velocity, and build the engineering culture as we scale. You're the person the team looks to when the problem is ambiguous, the stakes are high, and the path forward hasn't been written yet. If you combine deep technical craft with the ability to lead people and communicate with clarity, we want to meet you. WHY HILBERT AI Hilbert is building the demand intelligence platform used by world-class B2C leaders — including the world's largest retailer — to unlock compounding growth outcomes. We sit at the intersection of AI, data, and commercial activation for retail and e-commerce. We're scaling fast with top-tier investors behind us. The AI stack is the product — which means engineering leadership here has direct, measurable impact on enterprise customers and revenue. We're a small, talent-dense, low-ego team. We value ownership, speed, intellectual honesty, and shipping real impact. THE ROLE You'll work directly with the founding team and across product, data, and GTM to lead the design, development, and evolution of the AI systems at the heart of Hilbert. You'll be hands-on and in the code daily — but you'll also be the person who defines how we build, how we prioritize, and how we grow the engineering team. The environment is high-autonomy and high-ambiguity — the nature of building AI-native products means requirements shift, approaches evolve, and the person closest to the problem often makes the call. As Lead, you make sure the team is equipped to make those calls well. WHAT YOU'LL DO: Build — hands-on, every day - Design, build, and maintain AI-driven features and pipelines that serve enterprise customers at scale - Architect and implement agent-based workflows using LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent orchestration frameworks - Own critical systems end-to-end — from experimentation through production deployment and monitoring - Build and improve evaluation pipelines to measure, validate, and iterate on AI system performance - Make pragmatic engineering decisions under ambiguity — ship, learn, iterate Lead — set direction and raise the bar - Define and own the technical roadmap for the AI stack in partnership with the founding team - Make architecture and infrastructure decisions that balance speed today with scalability tomorrow - Set engineering standards — code quality, review practices, testing, documentation, and deployment discipline - Prioritize ruthlessly across competing demands, keeping the team focused on highest-impact work - Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, and progress clearly to founders and non-technical stakeholders - Be the tiebreaker when the team is stuck — on architecture, approach, or prioritization Grow — build the team and the culture - Hire, mentor, and develop AI engineers as the team scales - Create an environment of ownership, intellectual honesty, and high-velocity shipping - Run effective processes without bureaucracy — standups, reviews, retros that actually help - Identify skill gaps and build the team to fill them — whether through hiring, upskilling, or restructuring work - Lead by example: the team sees you in the code, in the reviews, in the hard problems — not just in meetings OUR CURRENT HURDLES These are the kinds of problems you'll walk into on day one — an