Lead Engineer

Company: KYBER1

About KYBER1
KYBER1 is an early-stage commerce media company that helps retailers and other data owners turn consented first-party customer and transaction data into media revenue. Commerce media is one of the fastest-growing categories in advertising, but activation is concentrated in a handful of giant networks. We serve everyone else: the thousands of retailers and data-rich organizations with valuable first-party signals and no practical, governed way to bring them to market.
Our platform will take a partner from raw commerce data to activation-ready audiences: ingesting and normalizing first-party signals, resolving identity deterministically, gating PII before it becomes a liability, building audiences aligned to real buying behavior, and activating them across approved channels, including directly to AI planning and buying agents through the open Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). We are agentic by design, in the product and in how we run the company: agents do real work here, and a small team ships what used to take departments.
The Role
We're looking for a Lead Engineer to own our core platform architecture and drive it from early product to production scale. You'll be the senior technical voice in the room: designing systems, shipping code daily, and setting the engineering standards the team grows into. This is a builder's role, hands-on keyboard, not a management-only seat.
Because we're a startup, we're flexible on how we start working together. We're open to a contract-to-hire arrangement or a bootstrap-style engagement, and a full-time opportunity with equity is on the table for the right talent.
What You'll Do
* Architect, build, and ship the core data-activation pipeline: first-party data ingestion, normalization, deterministic identity resolution, audience segmentation, and activation
* Design and deploy agentic AI systems as first-class parts of the product, including our Signals Agent and AdCP integration, so external planning and buying agents can discover and activate KYBER1 audiences directly
* Build the trust layer that makes it safe to put agents near valuable data: PII gating, access control on every agent query, and honest, reported match rates as a proof metric
* Own technical direction: make pragmatic build-vs-buy-vs-partner calls, set coding and review standards, and keep the stack simple enough to move fast
* Work directly with founders to translate product and commercial goals into technical roadmaps
* Wear many hats: infrastructure, backend, integrations (DSPs, clean rooms, retailer data systems), but you will have support building a team as we grow 
* Use agents as leverage inside the business, engineering, data normalization, reporting, operations, and help hire and mentor the engineers who come after you
What We're Looking For
* 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least some of that in a senior, lead, or founding-engineer capacity
* Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems, multi-step LLM workflows, tool use / function calling, agent orchestration frameworks, or autonomous pipelines in production
* Strong backend and distributed-systems fundamentals: APIs, event-driven architectures, data stores, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
* Ad tech experience is a highly desirable, programmatic advertising, RTB, DSP/SSP integrations, attribution, or retail/commerce media
* Experience with data-heavy systems is a strong plus, identity resolution, audience data, CDPs, clean rooms, privacy-safe data handling, or large-scale ETL/normalization pipelines
* Startup DNA: comfortable with ambiguity, biased toward shipping, and able to make good decisions with incomplete information
* Collaborative by nature: comfortable pitching in outside your lane, and just as invested in the team's wins as your own
* Clear communicator who can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
* Willingness to start on a contract-to-hire or bootstrap basis, with the intent and appetite to convert to a full-time leadership role as the company grows
Nice to Have
* Experience taking a product from zero to one at an early-stage company
* Familiarity with the modern AI stack: LLM APIs, vector databases, RAG pipelines, evaluation and observability tooling
* Prior exposure to high-throughput, low-latency systems (ad serving, bidding, streaming data)
* Familiarity with emerging agentic ad standards such as the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP)
What We Offer
* A ground-floor seat at a commerce media startup where your architecture becomes the company's foundation
* Flexible engagement to start (contract-to-hire or bootstrap), with a full-time offer, including equity, competitive salary, health benefits, unlimited PTO and fully remote 
* Direct access to founders and real influence over product and technical strategy
* A genuinely agent-native way of working: high leverage, low bureaucracy, and a standard we hold everywhere, assume an agent is on the other side, and that it is choosing whom to trust

apply