Technical Lead - Agentic AI

Directors
  • Austin
  • Permanent
  • Permanent IT & Technical
  • 1705955
  • 03/09/2026
Technical Lead – Agentic AI
Austin, TX
$140,000–$170,000 Salary

Certus Recruitment is partnering with an Austin-based technology organization making a significant investment in AI, advanced automation and agentic engineering.

They're building frontier AI models and AI agents directly into their core technology environment – not as experiments, but as systems performing meaningful work in production environments where accuracy, reliability and performance matter.

They're now looking for a senior engineer to help shape what comes next.
This is a technical leadership role, but it's not a move away from coding.
You'll remain highly hands-on while helping establish the architecture, engineering standards and operating patterns that allow autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents to work reliably within carefully engineered constraints.

What you'll be doing:
  • Leading projects across the agentic AI platform
  • Designing and building production-grade AI agent systems
  • Defining architecture, interfaces and technical direction
  • Establishing approaches to evaluation, testing, validation and safeguards
  • Helping determine how AI-generated engineering work is constrained and verified
  • Removing technical roadblocks and driving development forward
  • Influencing the AI and engineering roadmap
  • Helping hire and develop the engineering team as it grows
  • Working directly with technical and business stakeholders
What we're looking for:
  • 5–8 years' hands-on software engineering experience
  • Previous technical leadership experience – a formal Lead title isn't necessary
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals
  • Practical experience building agentic AI systems that have operated in production
  • Experience with AI agents performing substantive work within engineered constraints
  • An understanding of where autonomous systems fail and how to test, validate and safeguard their output
  • Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code
  • Comfortable working across languages and frameworks – potentially including Python, .NET or similar environments
You don't need to have completed an organization's entire transition to agentic engineering – very few people have.

What matters is that you've actually started doing it, encountered the real-world problems and developed informed technical opinions from production experience.

This is a rare opportunity to remain deeply technical while having significant influence over how an organization designs, governs, validates and deploys agentic AI.

Interested? Apply directly or contact Certus Recruitment for a confidential conversation.
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