Founding Engineering Lead

About the Position

Founding Engineering Lead

About Altis

Altis provides independent, institutional-grade diligence research on Series A and later-stage companies for venture investors. Private investors are beginning to rely on the proprietary research, experts, and data that is only available on the Altis platform. The team pairs MBB-caliber diligence training with advanced AI to create high-quality work faster and at a lower cost than traditional methods.

About the Role

Altis is growing their Founding Engineering team to help drive their product offerings and own different parts of the tech stack. You'll report directly to the CEO, partner with our existing engineering team on architecture and roadmap, and help build the team from 2 engineers today toward roughly 10. The biggest gap you'll be closing on day one: bringing a product mindset to our roadmap that’s deeply tied to speeding up our research processes.

New York City - in-person; 4 days a week expected.

Responsibilities

• Help share and own the roadmap and delivery of Altis' internal research-enablement tooling - sit with the research and sourcing teams to understand their real workflows, with a goal of meaningfully cutting the time it takes them to produce a report
• Commit to delivery dates for engineering's key initiatives, hit them, or flag slippage early and clearly
• Partner with our existing engineering team on architecture decisions, including Altis's move toward direct API/MCP access for customers
• Report directly to the CEO as a technical thought partner on product and roadmap tradeoffs
• Stand up the engineering processes (planning, review, ownership) a growing team needs
• Help design and run the technical interview process as the team scales

Requirements

• A track record of shipping software that is an excellent product that its intended users actually adopted, not just software shipped to spec
• Comfort owning and communicating delivery timelines, including flagging risk before it becomes a surprise
• Strong communication skills with both technical peers and non-technical stakeholders, including a CEO
• Experience with AI-native, LLM- or RAG-powered products

Nice to Have

• Experience leading and scaling engineering teams, ideally at an early-stage (seed/Series A) startup - rather than a background primarily at a large/big tech company
• Exposure to designing external API or MCP-style developer surfaces
• Comfort evaluating and evolving an existing codebase and architecture built by an early engineering team

We Offer

• Competitive cash and equity compensation, commensurate with experience and scope
• A direct reporting line to the CEO and real ownership over key engineering and product decisions.
• A ground-floor seat at a fast-growing, recently-funded research company with early customer traction across venture and institutional investors
• A New York City-based team

About the Company

We believe confident nonsense is worse than honest ambiguity. Altis operates with the same rigor and transparency in how we build our own tools as we do in the research we sell - full ownership, clear communication, and no shortcuts on the truth.