Member of Technical Staff - AI Engineering Lead

Member of Technical Staff - AI Engineering Lead Tessl is a fast-growing Series A startup based in London, founded by Guy Podjarny. We’ve raised over $100M from world-class investors including Index Ventures, Accel, GV, and Boldstart, and in 2025 we were ranked #2 in Sifted EU’s B2B SaaS Rising 100 and #20 in Sifted's AI 100. At Tessl, we believe AI is transforming software development. AI Native Developers will define features, architecture, and workflows in specs, not code, guiding the work of AI agents. We’re building the pioneering platform for this new paradigm and leading the developer movement and ecosystem around it. Joining Tessl means becoming an early team member with the opportunity to shape the future of how software is created and maintained. THE ROLE As AI Engineering Lead, you’ll lead the charge in defining and scaling the intelligence that powers our Agent Enablement Platform. You’ll shape the research roadmap, architecting multi-agent systems that automatically generate and retrieve context that makes AI a dependable teammate for developers. You’ll oversee a hybrid team of researchers and engineers working at the frontier of context generation, retrieval, and evaluation. Together, you’ll design systems that can interpret complex development environments, synthesize documentation, and continuously measure and improve agent effectiveness as a project evolves. You’ll balance hands-on technical depth with high-leverage leadership—diving into Python orchestration code one moment, then steering long-term architecture, evaluation frameworks, and team growth the next. This is a role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves fast without breaking rigor, and can make thoughtful calls on when to ship and when to invest in foundations. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Architect and own our AI pipelines — from multi-agent workflows and retrieval pipelines to automatic evaluation and feedback loops. - Design scalable context generation systems that synthesize documentation, styleguides, and steering artefacts to enhance agent performance. - Optimize retrieval pipelines to achieve the ideal balance of quality, latency, and cost. - Build internal tooling for evaluation, context engineering, and inference — the backbone of how we train and measure our agents. - Collaborate across teams (PM, UX, product engineering, and leadership) to ship high-impact features at startup speed. - Define and scale the team culture — recruiting top talent, mentoring others, and embedding the principles of AI-native engineering into everything we build. WHAT YOU’LL BRING Technical Skills - A degree (Masters/PhD preferred) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, or related fields. - 10+ years of engineering experience, with 3+ years leading AI-focused teams. - Fluency in some of these areas: Python, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, vector databases, and eval tooling. - Strong fundamentals in Machine Learning, Data Science and Evaluation Frameworks - Experience with agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic workflows - Experience developing agentic workflows - Proven experience shipping AI-first products that bridge research and real-world application. - Comfort working across the stack or partnering closely with frontend/backend teams. Soft skills - A strong perspective on coding agents, how they impact the software development lifecycle, and the future of code generation research. - A bias for outcomes and iteration — you care more about improving performance than chasing perfection. - A mentor’s mindset — able to guide a fast-moving team while staying hands-on and curious. - Excitement to build the industry’s first agent enablement platform for developers and enterprises. BENEFITS, SALARY & OFFICE Office: Our brand new 10,000 sq. ft office is in the AI hub of Kings Cross, London. We have generous catering and have regular social events such as team lunches, drinks and mo ... (truncated, view full listing at source)