Lead Engineer | Agentic Systems

Lead Engineer | Agentic Systems at Origin Studios ABOUT US We're a stealth-stage startup building agentic workflows for the entertainment industry. We're a small team of music lovers with experience across Warner Music, UMG, NASA, Apple, and Intel. Our partners are senior figures from the top record labels. THE ROLE We're looking for a lead engineer to take ownership of our technical execution. You'll help translate partner conversations into scoped technical work, set the engineering bar, and ship the core systems behind our agent products. You'll write code, design systems, and review other engineers' work. We want someone who's interested in a fast-moving early-stage product and wants real ownership of what gets built. WHAT YOU'LL DO Own the design and implementation of our core agent platform: orchestration, tool and MCP integrations, memory, skills, evaluation, observability, and recovery Spec and ship custom agents and workflows for partner use cases Lead the engineering team as it grows: set conventions, review code, implement best practices, and help decide next hires Be involved in strategy discussions, translate requirements into scoped work, push back on half-formed asks, and surface trade-offs early Stay flexible across agent design, architecture, development, and review week to week REQUIREMENTS 6+ years of professional software engineering with ownership of meaningful systems Strong general engineering fundamentals: you write clean, maintainable code, design systems that hold up, and care about reliability Hands-on experience with agentic systems: LLM APIs, tool use, MCP, orchestration, memory, evaluation, RAG, long-running execution, failure recovery Ability to lead other engineers: set direction, review code, implement best practices Strong written communication: clear specs and documentation, decision records, and review comments Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and startup pace Full-time availability on Pacific Time NICE TO HAVE Experience extending or working inside agent environments (Claude Code, OpenClaw, Cursor, custom harnesses, etc.) Cloud and infra experience: IaC, secrets management, logging, production deployment Experience with security and audit-sensitive deployments (least privilege, audit logs, secrets hygiene) Experience building MVPs and zero-to-one products Experience building technology in the entertainment industry Love for art and music Based in LA with interest in in-person work COMPENSATION $170,000–$240,000 base, depending on experience Meaningful equity for someone who wants real ownership in what we're building