Lead AI Engineer

LEAD AI ENGINEER

ABOUT SIERRA STUDIO

When you apply to Sierra, you join an ecosystem. We specialize in connecting talented Brazilian professionals with exciting career opportunities in a highly-vetted small community of growing companies in the US. Applying to Sierra seamlessly integrates you into this ecosystem, granting automatic eligibility for all relevant opportunities we offer.

Location: Brazil, remote

Compensation: $70k – $120k USD, CNPJ

Reports to: Founder & CEO

ABOUT OUR HIRING PARTNER

Our hiring partner is a US-based retention marketing agency helping DTC brands build personal relationships with their customers at scale through the channels they own: email, SMS, and everything in between. Their thesis is simple: brands shouldn't have to grow by unprofitably spending more on paid social. Everything they do is built around producing programs and messages that customers actually want and that actually perform.

They're a team of about 12 (strategists, specialists, designers, copywriters, and ops), fully remote, at ~$1.2M in revenue with a goal to double in the next four months. They partner with the leading platforms in the space and are now evolving from an agency with great internal tooling into something closer to an agency and a software company combined.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our hiring partner is hiring their first engineer.

The founder has already built the foundation himself using AI coding tools: a data layer that pulls Klaviyo data for every client into the company's own Supabase database (so the team can query it in ways the platform's native API doesn't allow), a set of AI skills and workflows the team uses instead of building reports by hand, and a diagnostics tool made of agents that continuously QA client accounts and flag what's broken. On top of that sit early products that are somewhere between prototype and solid foundation.

It works and it's validated. But it was built by one person, and it's reached a level of disorganization that isn't sustainable as the company scales. The products need to be rebuilt with scale in mind, and the whole system needs an engineer who owns it.

That's where you come in. You'll own the architecture end to end: auditing what exists, deciding what stays and what gets rebuilt, and turning it into a fully maintained codebase with clear guidelines. You'll pair closely with the founder, who leads on product while you lead on development, iterating on agency workflows and products with feedback that comes directly from clients. And you'll build agentic flows across nearly every area of the business, from account diagnostics to go-to-market, which today are all built and maintained by the founder alone.

This is a lead role, not a founding-engineer-in-name-only role: you set the technical direction and standards for everything that gets built, and as the engineering function grows, you'll be the one shaping it.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

ARCHITECTURE AND CODEBASE

• Audit everything that's been built so far, define what stays, what gets rebuilt, and how it all fits together.

• Take the current system (hosted on Cloudflare, with Supabase as the data layer, all connected) to a fully maintained, documented codebase with clear standards and guidelines.

• Design the data pipelines: ingestion from Klaviyo, Postscript, and Attentive, modeling and storage in Supabase, syncing, and querying beyond what the platforms' APIs allow.

• Build for scale and clarity, so the business has a foundation it can actually execute on rather than a pile of scripts.

AGENTIC WORKFLOWS AND INTERNAL TOOLING

• Design and ship agents and AI skills for account diagnostics, reporting, QA, go-to-market, and internal ops.

• Make internal AI tooling reliable and consistent, so the ops team can roll it out across the team with confidence.

• Define the quality boundaries so the whole team gets the same results the founder gets.

PRODUCTS

• Evolve the early products built on top of the data layer into somet