Lead Engineer

About Ande We're a Series A startup building an AI-native platform that connects Enterprises and Hospitality across the entire booking experience, backed by top-tier investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Bain Capital, and led by a serial entrepreneur with offices in NYC and SF. We help companies turn every dinner, event, and offsite into something effortless to plan and a breeze to manage, plugging right into the tools they already use.

About the Role We are looking for a Lead Full-Stack Engineer to lead the design, development, and deployment of our next-generation agentic applications. This role bridges robust full-stack architecture with AI agents: building scalable Node.js services, crafting intuitive React interfaces, and designing autonomous agents that plan, use tools, take actions on behalf of our users, and work alongside our service team to solve complex problems. As a senior member of the team, this person will champion technical excellence, mentor junior developers, and influence the product roadmap.

What You'll Do

AI Agents & Engineering

• Architect and implement agentic systems that plan, call tools, and take actions on behalf of users, built on LLMs and AI services (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, or custom internal model endpoints)

• Design the tools, context, and memory agents rely on: typed capabilities over our APIs, context orchestration, and structured outputs that turn agent decisions into application logic

• Build evaluation suites (scenario-based evals, graders, and LLM judges) and use them to gate releases and measure agent quality, latency, and cost

• Implement guardrails, human approvals for consequential actions, prompt-injection defenses, provider failover, caching, and rate-limiting to keep agents reliable, secure, and cost-efficient

• Design handoffs between agents and people, so the agent knows when to act, when to ask, and when to escalate to our human team

• Stay current on emerging agentic patterns, model capabilities, and integration techniques to drive product innovation

Full-Stack Development

• Build, scale, and maintain highly performant, secure, production-ready APIs using Node.js

• Develop responsive, state-managed, visually seamless user interfaces using React.js

• Optimize application performance across the stack, from database query optimization to frontend rendering bottlenecks

Architecture & Leadership

• Lead architectural decisions, promoting modular design, code reusability, and scalable system infrastructure

• Enforce high engineering standards through rigorous code reviews, automated testing (unit, integration, E2E, and evals), and comprehensive documentation

• Champion AI-assisted development: set the standards for building with AI coding agents and reviewing the code they produce

• Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical growth

• Partner with Product Managers, UX Designers, and stakeholders to translate ambitious product visions into concrete technical execution

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade SaaS applications

• Deep expertise in backend development using Node.js and TypeScript, including asynchronous programming, event-driven architecture, and services

• Advanced proficiency in React.js

• 1–2+ years of practical experience building LLM-powered agents or agentic workflows (tool use, multi-step planning, structured outputs) into customer-facing applications

• Experience evaluating AI systems in production: building evals, reading failure cases, and improving agent quality over time

• Comfort building with AI coding agents as part of your daily workflow

• Strong proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL)

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Docker, and CI/CD pipelines

• Exceptional problem-solving skills and a proactive ownership mindset

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical or AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders

• Proven ability to thrive in a fast-paced, iterative environment

Equal Employment Opportunity Ande is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates and will consider all applicants for employment without regard to any legally protected status.