Tech Lead at Duvo

WHO WE ARE Enterprise teams still copy data between systems all day. Work gets stuck in emails, legacy UIs, and handoffs. That chaos is costly, slow, and risky. We're a fast-moving team on a mission to end it for good. Traction is strong and we're solving real problems for real customers—but to win, we need exceptional talent. We stay humble, do the work, and let results speak. WHAT WE ARE BUILDING We're building the AI operations platform for retail and CPG enterprises—a horizontal platform where AI agents execute end-to-end work across UIs and APIs with governance built in. Where copilots stop, Duvo finishes the job. Business users specify the outcome; agents plan, act, request approvals on exceptions, and learn with every run. We start with a retail wedge (category management, supply chain, finance ops) where ROI is obvious, then expand to adjacent functions and sectors. Velocity is our moat: ship fast, iterate faster, compound learning. THE ROLE You will own the technical direction of an initiative and the team that delivers it. You're an excellent product engineer who ships code alongside your team — and you combine that IC excellence with accountability for your people. This is not a "manager who used to code" role. You write production code, review PRs, make architecture calls, and set the engineering standard your team rallies around. Expect to spend 50–60% of your time in code. You also run 1:1s, give feedback, hire, and grow people — but your leadership is rooted in technical credibility. Your unit of ownership: the technical quality, velocity, and direction of your initiative, plus the growth and performance of your engineers. We're a growing product team scaling into multiple initiatives, each with a lead, engineers, a design engineer, and an AI-focused engineer. You'll lead one of these initiatives. We have strong engineers who could grow into this role — we're hiring externally for management experience from day one, so our existing engineers can focus on shipping. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR These are non-negotiables—the things we'll specifically evaluate you on: - Shipping and ownership. You've repeatedly taken ambiguous problems to production with measurable outcomes. You own features end-to-end: UI → API → data → deployment. - Technical leadership. You make architecture decisions, manage tech-debt tradeoffs, and set quality standards. Your team trusts your judgment because you're in the codebase with them. - AI/ML product literacy. You have hands-on experience building with LLMs, retrieval systems, or evaluation harnesses. You understand the primitives well enough to make sound build-vs-integrate decisions and catch failure modes. - Product judgment. You can define MVP scope, pick the right metric to move, and kill work that isn't delivering value. You connect technical choices to customer outcomes, not just technical elegance. - People management. You run 1:1s, give direct feedback, support career development, and hire well. Your management style is shoulder-to-shoulder, not top-down. Part of your job is developing engineers on your team into future technical leaders. - Judgment under pressure. You'll decide build-vs-buy, choose between shipping fast and shipping right, and make architecture calls that affect the whole platform — often without complete information. YOU MIGHT ALSO - Have a strong sense for security and reliability in production AI systems. - Have excellent UI/UX taste and an eye for detail — our product is the interface between enterprises and AI agents, and craft matters. - Be a full-stack generalist who thrives on new problems and ambiguity. - Have designed and operated distributed systems at scale. - Have deep applied LLM experience — evaluation design, prompt engineering, safety controls, and cost optimization in production. THIS IS NOT FOR YOU IF - You want a pure management role without writing code — see Engineering Manager [Upgrade to PRO to see link] - You see management as career advancement rather than a way to multiply your team's impact. OUR TECH STACK - TypeScript-first - React and Fastify - Postgres, GCP - Latest AI primitives HOW WE WORK These are real tradeoffs we've made, not aspirations: - Initiative-driven. We organize around customer problems, not org charts. Problems surface through product feedback, competitive analysis, and direct customer conversations — then we prioritize, build, and ship weekly. - Customer-obsessed. We solve real problems, not hypothetical ones. Features that don't move customer metrics get cut. - Iterative by default. We ship small, learn fast, and never get attached to yesterday's code. This means things break sometimes — we fix forward. - AI-first leverage. We use AI to move faster and focus human time where it matters most. If a tool can do it, a person shouldn't. - Direct feedback. We give each other actionable feedback immediately. This can feel uncomfortable — we think that's worth it. - Autonomy with accountability. We trust people to make decisions and hold them to outcomes, not process. WHAT WE OFFER - Unlimited AI budget. We don't just allow AI tools — we strongly encourage them. Want to try a new tool? Buy it. Want to automate part of your workflow? Do it. - Autonomy to do your best work. Want to meet someone to learn from? Set it up. Want a mentor? Go get one. Want to fly out to talk to an important customer? Just ask. - A real AI product with real customers. You're not building demos or internal tools. Enterprise customers use what you ship, and their feedback drives what you build next. - A sharp, motivated team that values ownership and candor. - Competitive compensation with a meaningful equity component. You can trade salary for additional equity if you prefer more upside. HOW WE HIRE We respect your time and aim to move fast: 1. Hiring manager screen (30 min). We'll talk about what you've built, how you lead, and whether there's mutual fit. 2. Remote task (async, time-boxed, ~1 hour). A realistic technical leadership exercise — an architectural decision, not just coding. 3. Technical interview (Prague, ~1 hour). Meet the team. We'll go deeper on system design, product thinking, and how you lead people. No trick questions — we want to see how you think and build. 4. On-site trial day (2 days). Ship something small to production with us and see how we work together. Fully compensated.