sylvan-labs

Founding Engineering Lead

New York, NY
Full-time
$200K - $400K
Posted Aug 18, 2026

Job description

ABOUT SYLVAN

Sylvan is building autonomous revenue teams.

We help B2B companies grow and protect revenue from their existing customers by identifying revenue-driving signals and deploying agents that act on them at the exact moment, across every account. We work with customers ranging from fast-growth startups to Fortune 500 enterprises like ServiceNow. Our ambition is to power the top-line of the economy.

We are guided by a core principle: no assholes, high mutual respect. We operate at high intensity, but with deep respect. Direct, honest, and no egos — just a shared obsession to win.

We’ve raised $10M+ from world-class investors and strategics including TQ Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. We are a fully in-office company based in New York City.

We will only hire A-players and are highly willing to go above-market in ownership, equity, and cash compensation. We want world-class builders who are excited by the opportunity to be part of a category-defining company at the earliest stage. It won’t be easy. We’re going to move fast. But, it’ll be fun.

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Founding Engineering Lead who is both the commando shipping the first version of hard things and a strategist on some of the most interesting applied AI problems in enterprise software.

You'll own technical architecture end to end while sharing in the product roadmap and ML strategy alongside the founders — which means following the research closely enough to argue about what applies to a system acting on live revenue and what's still hand-waving.

The shape of the week changes. Call it 75% building and 25% leading over a year, but expect the mix to swing. You'll be leading a pod of three to four engineers, including their growth and performance, and you'll still be the one shipping.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

•Technical lead on new initiatives, spearheading initial designs and builds vs. reviewing someone else’s.

•Own the architecture behind our core platform. You make the build-versus-buy and infrastructure cost calls.

•Set the engineering bar for a team where agents write most of the code. Review standards, definition of done, release cadence, on-call.

•Lead the pod. Sprint scope and sequencing, unblocking, growth and performance conversations, and hiring the engineers who come next.

•Shape technical direction with our CTO. Product roadmap, ML approach, model strategy.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

•You work at the frontier of agent-driven development. You've built your own setup rather than living on the defaults, and you keep finding ways to get more out of agents than they give most people.

•5+ years of engineering experience, ideally including time as a technical founder, founding engineer, or staff IC who led a pod at a place with a high bar.

•You were the primary author on something that shipped in the last six months, and owned delivery end-to-end with little oversight to catch your failures.

•You've been accountable for other engineers' output as a tech lead, pod lead, or manager.

•Applied ML judgment, both classical (you know which technique fits which data, and you catch a bad validation design before anyone points at it) and frontier (informed opinions on transformers, world models, and can argue on ML applications)

•High tolerance for ambiguity, inherited code, and unglamorous work. Based in NYC, excited to be in-office.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Sylvan is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.