Software Engineer Lead (Full Stack)

About Alpha-Z

At Alpha-Z, we build AI for decision-making. We solve complex decisions from messy goals, constraints, and evidence—translating them into answers that are derivable, consistent, and verifiable. Our system bridges LLMs for problem formulation with algorithmic solvers, creating a decision layer where assumptions can be reviewed, not hidden in a black box. What works gets stored as a structured insight, so the next decision starts smarter.

We are looking for a hands-on Software Engineer to help build the core product from the ground up.

What you'll do

• Build and own product engineering end-to-end, hands-on — from architecture and backend development to frontend and infrastructure.
• Build the APIs and backend services that connect our LLM problem-formulation layer, algorithmic solvers, and knowledge library.
• Take features from 0→1 — from understanding the problem and designing the architecture to building, deploying and iterating in production.
• Work with AI Research Scientists to turn research outputs and prototypes into reliable, production-ready product features.
• Explore and integrate LLMs and AI/agentic workflows where they add value to the product.
• Design systems for asynchronous, long-running and compute-intensive workloads.
• Make pragmatic technology and build-vs-buy decisions as the product evolves.
• Own cloud infrastructure, deployments, monitoring and reliability, while ensuring enterprise data remains secure.
• Establish engineering standards across testing, code review, CI/CD, and development practices that future hires can build upon.
• Build practical frontend components where needed to help users interact with and understand the platform's outputs.
• Work closely with the founders and research team to shape and build the product as we scale.

What we look for

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 3–7 years of software engineering experience, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Strong backend engineering skills and experience building production systems.
• Experience taking a product from early stage to production, ideally as an early or sole engineer.
• Demonstrated experience taking a product, feature or system from 0→1.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to make architecture and implementation decisions independently.
• Comfortable working independently in an early-stage environment with ambiguity and changing requirements.
• Experience building and deploying APIs and backend services.
• Ability to work closely with researchers or technical teams and translate complex technical work into usable product features.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly.
• A builder mindset — pragmatic, hands-on and willing to work across different parts of the stack.

Technical expertise

Backend & LLM Integration

• Strong experience with Python, Node.js, Go or similar backend technologies.
• Strong RESTful API design and backend development experience.
• Experience with databases, asynchronous task queues and long-running or compute-intensive workloads.
• Own cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure.
• Experience with CI/CD, containerisation, logging and monitoring.
• Experience integrating APIs, third-party services or complex technical systems.

AI / LLM

• Experience with LLMs, AI applications or agentic systems is a strong plus.
• Experience integrating LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or open-source models is advantageous.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM orchestration or AI workflows is advantageous.
• Experience turning AI/ML research or prototypes into production systems is a plus.

Frontend Engineering

• Practical experience with a modern frontend framework such as React, Vue or Svelte.
• Able to build or modify frontend components that connect to backend APIs and present dense, structured insights and model reasoning clearly.