Founding AI Tech Lead (Founding Member)

We're hiring a Founding AI Tech Lead (Founding Member) — ExpatReady

Lead the technical and AI strategy for the operating system of the global immigration industry, as a founding member of the team.

Location: Remote/Onsite: with daily overlap into Canadian business hours

Compensation: Competitive, plus founding equity

Additional: A Canadian PR / sponsorship pathway is available for the right candidate

ABOUT US

ExpatReady is a multi-tenant SaaS platform for immigration firms, covering the full client journey: lead, assessment, consult, retainer, payment, case delivery, and client portal. We are launching with Canadian immigration and building toward a global platform, where each new country is configurable data rather than a new build.

Our product principles:

• Native tooling. Every tool a practitioner needs is built natively in-product rather than relying on third-party integrations.
• Composable architecture. One capability equals one module equals one toggle. This is a composable platform, not a monolithic CRM.
• Content-neutral engine. The core system holds no immigration content; all domain knowledge is versioned, structured data.
• AI-native. We build with AI tools as part of our daily engineering process, and we are developing an AI companion layer as the next phase of the product.

The core platform architecture is locked and in active development, led by our engineer, Arun, alongside a founding full-stack engineer. We are now adding a founding AI Tech Lead to own the technical direction of our AI companion layer and to bring senior engineering leadership to the team.

THE ROLE

This is a dual-mandate founding role: technical leadership across the engineering team, and deep, hands-on ownership of how AI models are evaluated, validated, and trained for use in our product. You will work directly with the founder and set technical standards the rest of the team builds against.

Technical leadership responsibilities:

• Provide senior technical judgment on architecture, code quality, and engineering practice across the team
• Review and validate significant design and implementation decisions, including work produced with AI coding tools
• Help set engineering standards, review processes, and technical roadmap as the team grows
• Mentor other engineers and raise the overall technical bar AI / model responsibilities:
• Design and run evaluation pipelines to validate LLM outputs for correctness, safety, and reliability in an immigration-case context, where accuracy has real legal and financial consequences for clients
• Build and maintain human and automated evaluation frameworks (evals, rubrics, labeled test sets, regression suites) for model behavior
• Fine-tune, prompt-engineer, and otherwise adapt models for structured tasks: document understanding, form-fill, eligibility scoring, and conversational assistance
• Own the retrieval and tool-use architecture for the AI companion layer (agents, RAG, structured output)
• Establish guardrails, monitoring, and quality gates so AI-generated content in the product is trustworthy and auditable
• Stay current with the AI/LLM landscape and bring informed recommendations on model choice, tooling, and technique

TECH STACK

Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, Prisma, PostgreSQL (with Row-Level Security), Redis and BullMQ, S3, AWS (ca-central-1), React 19, on the platform side. On the AI side: LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar), evaluation and observability tooling, RAG/retrieval infrastructure, and fine-tuning or adaptation workflows as needed.

REQUIREMENTS

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including demonstrated technical leadership (tech lead, staff engineer, or similar scope, not just people management)
• Hands-on experience building and evaluating LLM-powered features in production, not just using AI coding assistants
• Direct experience with model evaluation methodology: building eval sets, rubrics, human-in-the-loop review, or automated grading of model outputs
• Experience with at least one of: fine-tuning/adapting models, RAG systems, agentic/tool-use architectures, or structured-output pipelines
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, data modeling, API design, and code review at a senior level
• Comfortable operating as a hands-on IC and as a technical leader simultaneously — this is a small team, not a management-only role
• Ability to work full-time, remote from India, with daily overlap into Canadian business hours
• Excellent written English and strong self-directed, asynchronous communication skills

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Prior experience as an AI trainer, model evaluator, or RLHF/preference-data contributor (e.g., with an AI lab or a data/evaluation vendor)
• Experience in regulated or high-stakes domains where model accuracy has real consequences (legal, immigration, healthcare, finance)
• Full-stack engineering background (TypeScript/Node.js, React, PostgreSQL) so you can engage directly with the platform codebase, not just the AI layer
• Experience setting technical direction or engineering standards for an early-stage team
• Familiarity with LLM observability and monitoring tooling

Interested in opportunities specifically in India? Discover our dedicated Visa Sponsorship Jobs in India page featuring roles from top employers in this location.

WHAT WE OFFER

• A founding-team role with genuine technical ownership and influence over both product architecture and AI strategy
• Founding equity for the right early team member
• A Canadian PR / sponsorship pathway
• Competitive compensation for a senior remote role, with additional upside as the company grows
• A remote-first position, based anywhere in India, on a Canadian-hours schedule

HOW TO APPLY

Please send:

1. Your resume or LinkedIn profile, and GitHub or code samples
2. A description of an LLM-powered feature or system you've built or evaluated end-to-end — the problem, your evaluation approach, and how you knew it was working (or wasn't)
3. An example of technical leadership you've provided — a decision you drove, a standard you set, or a team you raised the bar for
4. Your notice period and your availability for a Canadian-hours schedule

Our process: a short introductory call, followed by a paid or live technical/AI evaluation exercise, followed by a working session with the team.

#Hiring #TechLead #AIEngineer #LLM #MachineLearning #RemoteJobs #StartupJobs #ImmigrationTech #SaaS #IndiaJobs #FoundingEngineer