Software Engineer, Tech Lead

About the role

We're looking for a hands-on technical leader to help shape both what we build and how we build it.

You'll be a technical leader for the engineering team: setting direction on complex projects, guiding engineers through difficult technical decisions, reviewing critical designs and code, and helping the team turn ambitious ideas into reliable production systems.

This is a deeply hands-on role. You'll write code, own systems, debug production, and ship alongside the rest of the team. But your impact should extend beyond the code you personally write — you'll help other engineers move faster, make better decisions, and maintain a high technical bar across the team.

You'll work across our stack and AI platform, from agent architecture and execution infrastructure to the production systems that support thousands of real-world hospitality operations.

About Akia

Akia builds AI agents for hospitality — a system of actions that handles guest communication, drives direct bookings, manages upsells, and operates the full guest lifecycle.

Our AI doesn't just answer questions. It takes action across real hotel operations: communicating with guests, coordinating workflows, interacting with external systems, and making decisions in environments where the inputs are messy and the consequences are real.

What You'll Do

Lead technical execution.

Take ambiguous product and engineering problems and turn them into clear technical plans. Help determine what needs to be built, how we should approach it, and how work should be divided across the team. Keep projects moving when the path isn't obvious.

Set technical direction.

Own architectural decisions across major parts of the product. Design systems that are simple, scalable, and maintainable — and know when not to introduce complexity.

Make the engineers around you better.

Be the person engineers turn to when they're stuck. Review designs and code, challenge weak abstractions, provide useful technical context, and help engineers develop the judgment to make increasingly difficult decisions independently.

Build production AI systems that actually act.

Design and build the architecture behind autonomous agents: modular skills, tool use, function calling, multi-step orchestration, context management, and the infrastructure that allows AI to safely take real-world actions. Build execution systems with retries, idempotency, rollback, auditability, human-in-the-loop controls, evaluations, and guardrails.

Own systems end to end.

Go from architecture to implementation to production. When something breaks, understand why. When something won't scale, fix the underlying system rather than patching the symptom.

Help the team stay ahead of reliability problems rather than waiting for incidents. Drive observability, performance, failure recovery, database health, infrastructure, and operational discipline.

Prioritize engineering effort.

Work closely with product and company leadership to understand what's most important, identify technical risks and dependencies, and help the team focus its time where it has the highest leverage.

Stay deeply hands-on.

This isn't an architecture-from-a-whiteboard position. You'll write significant production code and stay close enough to the system to know where the abstractions stop matching reality.

What We're Looking For

You're already a technical leader, title or not.

You've been the engineer others rely on for difficult decisions, ambiguous projects, code and design reviews, or production problems. You don't need formal authority to create clarity and move a team forward.

Strong architectural judgment.

You've designed and evolved substantial production systems. You understand distributed systems, databases, caching, queues, concurrency, service boundaries, and failure modes.

Ownership beyond your own tickets.

You notice when a project is drifting, a system is unhealthy, or another engineer is blocked — and you do something about it without waiting for someone to assign you the problem.

You have operated what you've built.

You've debugged production incidents, tuned slow queries, handled migrations, investigated mysterious performance problems, and been responsible when systems didn't behave the way the architecture diagram said they would.

You can move between levels of abstraction.

You're comfortable discussing the architecture of an agent platform in the morning and tracing a race condition or reviewing a database query in the afternoon.

You care deeply about AI agents.

You've built with LLMs and have opinions about what makes agentic systems work — and what makes them fail. RAG, tool use, orchestration, structured outputs, evaluations, context management, or related systems should be familiar territory.

You know how to engineer with AI, not just use it.

We use AI heavily in development. You can direct it effectively while recognizing bad abstractions, subtle correctness problems, naive error handling, security issues, and code that looks plausible but won't survive production.

You want to lead.

You enjoy creating clarity, helping engineers grow, and taking responsibility for the success of the team — not just your own output. You may want to stay primarily technical or grow into people management over time; we're open to both paths.

Experience

We're generally looking for someone with 8+ years of experience building production software, although we care substantially more about the depth of systems and teams you've helped lead than the number of years on your résumé.

A CS degree or equivalent technical depth is expected. You should be comfortable reasoning from first principles about data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, networking, databases, and concurrency.

Prior formal Tech Lead or Engineering Manager experience is not required. Demonstrated technical leadership is.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $180,000 – $230,000

Equity / stock options

Full health, dental, and vision coverage

Commuter benefits

401(k)

PTO