We are hiring a Lead AI Engineer to become the senior technical owner for Hooh’s engineering system: architecture, reliability, product delivery, and AI quality.
You will step into a shipped production codebase, take ownership of its technical direction, and work closely with product, design, and our iOS team as we grow the engineering function around you. This is a hands-on role first: you will set the standard by shipping clean, well-architected code, not just by reviewing plans.
A core part of the role is making Hooh an AI-native engineering organization in a serious, production-minded way. You should be excellent with AI coding agents and LLM-assisted development, but equally clear-eyed about their failure modes. You will define how we design, build, test, review, and ship with AI in the loop while keeping quality, security, and architecture disciplined.
This role can grow into Head of Engineering or CTO as the company scales. What you’ll own * Hooh’s full-stack TypeScript system: Next.js App Router, React, Node.js, Hono, Supabase, Postgres, pgvector, Vercel, and K3s on AWS. * The end-to-end document pipeline: ingest, OCR/text extraction, classification, structured extraction, embeddings, semantic search, summarization, and conversational Q&A. * Document manipulation workflows: PDF editing, versioning, rendering, export, DOCX/PDF handling, and performance at scale. * Production AI reliability: evals, guardrails, model routing, monitoring, latency, cost, and safety. * Engineering quality: architecture, tests, code review, delivery cadence, and technical decision-making.
Responsibilities ARCHITECTURE & TECHNICAL DIRECTION * Own service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and rollout patterns as the product surface grows. * Keep the system coherent across web, API, AI pipeline, database, storage, and iOS integration points. * Make pragmatic trade-offs around reliability, latency, cost, and speed of execution.
HANDS-ON ENGINEERING * Ship core product features across backend and web. * Work in a TypeScript monorepo with shared packages and clear architectural boundaries. * Build and improve APIs using Node.js and Hono. * Improve product-critical web flows in React and Next.js, with strong judgment around performance, state, rendering, and UX.
APPLIED AI IN PRODUCTION * Improve Hooh’s document understanding pipeline across OCR, extraction, summarization, Q&A, embeddings, and semantic search. * Operationalize LLM features with evals, guardrails, monitoring, and clear failure handling. * Make practical model-routing and cost/quality decisions across Claude, OpenAI, and future model providers.
RELIABILITY, SECURITY & TRUST * Design for idempotency, streaming, non-blocking processing, graceful failure, and horizontal scalability. * Protect per-user isolation across API, storage, database, and application layers. * Maintain strong standards around authentication, RLS, encryption, and secure handling of document data.
AI-NATIVE ENGINEERING * Define how Hooh uses AI coding agents and assistants in real engineering work. * Establish context patterns, prompting habits, review norms, tests, and quality gates for AI-assisted development. * Demonstrate that fast shipping and rigorous engineering can reinforce each other.
TEAM GROWTH * Work closely with the founder and iOS team. * Help shape future engineering hires and raise the technical bar as the team grows. * Create clarity through strong communication, ownership, and decisive execution.
What we’re looking for * 5+ years shipping production software, or 4+ years with unusually strong startup ownership. * Deep TypeScript/JavaScript experience across backend and frontend. * Strong backend fundamentals: APIs, auth, data modeling, async workflows, observability, and production reliability. * Strong Postgres experience: schema design, migrations, query performance, indexes, RLS or equivalent authorization patterns. * Experience with modern React and Next.js, especially product-critical authenticated applications. * Cloud and infrastructure fluency: AWS, containers, Kubernetes or K3s, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code. * Real experience using AI coding agents or assistants for production work, with a mature view of where they help and where they need guardrails. * Strong product judgment: able to move fast without over-engineering or creating future cleanup debt. * Clear communication and the ability to bring technical order to a fast-moving product.
Nice to have * Experience building production LLM features with evals, guardrails, observability, and model routing. * Experience with Supabase, Postgres RLS, pgvector, or similar Postgres-based platforms. * Experience with document tooling: PDF rendering, PDF editing, OCR, DOCX conversion, forms, or file-processing pipelines. * Experience with SSE, streaming UX, agentic/tool-using LLM loops, or background processing systems. * Experience integrating with mobile clients, especially iOS API constraints and versioning.
What we offer * Hard technical problems in AI, documents, privacy, and product engineering. * A shipped product with real architecture to own and improve. * A clear path into Head of Engineering or CTO as the company scales. * Fully remote work with reliable overlap to CET. * 18 paid vacation days, 8 no-paperwork sick days, and 11 public holidays per year. * Minimal bureaucracy, fast decisions, and direct influence on product and technical strategy. * Competitive compensation.
