Full Stack Tech Lead — Founding Engineer

About the role

VALSEA is hiring a founding-stage full stack tech lead to take end-to-end ownership of a speech AI API platform. In this role, you will work directly in production, building and scaling backend and frontend systems, resolving live issues as they happen, and guiding a team of 4 to 8 engineers and interns.

This position is designed for someone who wants deep ownership early. As one of the first engineers in the company, you will influence the technical direction, engineering standards, and team culture for the long term. You will report to the CEO and be accountable for architecture choices, code quality, delivery, infrastructure, and mentoring across the stack.

The company is focused on building the speech intelligence layer for Southeast Asia, converting accented and code-switched real-world speech into structured outputs for businesses.

Key ownership areas

• Take responsibility for architecture, code quality, and delivery across the full stack.
• Design and implement scalable backend APIs and microservices for real-time speech processing and billing.
• Make backend architecture decisions involving database structure, service boundaries, and data flow.
• Manage and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS.
• Keep APIs and services reliable, and make sure they recover cleanly after failures.
• Diagnose and resolve live production issues across audio pipelines, APIs, and data workflows.
• Define engineering practices, review code, and mentor junior teammates.
• Coordinate the work of engineers and interns.
• Own CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes.

What this role expects

• Comfort with making decisions even when requirements are incomplete.
• Ability to record assumptions and trade-offs proactively.
• Preference for reliable, predictable systems over overly clever solutions.
• Calmness and initiative when production incidents occur.
• A leadership style that sets the standard through action, not just job title.
• A strong bias toward action when something is broken or needs attention.

Must-have experience and capabilities

• At least 5 years of experience in backend, systems, or full stack engineering.
• Strong command of TypeScript, with the ability to own both server-side and client-side code.
• Solid experience designing production APIs, including REST, WebSockets, authentication, and rate limiting.
• Deep database knowledge covering schema design, migrations, transactions, and query performance.
• Hands-on experience operating production systems on AWS.
• Strong testing habits across unit, integration, and end-to-end layers.
• A security-first approach, including secrets handling, API key management, and PII boundaries.
• Working awareness of data privacy and compliance expectations across multiple regions.
• Experience debugging live systems under real user traffic.
• Comfort being accountable for how systems behave, not just for writing code.

Nice-to-have background

• Experience with real-time systems such as WebSocket session handling and audio streaming.
• Exposure to multi-tenant SaaS products, including billing, usage tracking, and plan management.
• Experience with observability and monitoring in production environments.
• Familiarity with integrating AI and APIs from multiple third-party providers.
• Knowledge of speech technology and automatic speech recognition.
• Experience with regional privacy frameworks such as PDPA, PDPL, or comparable regulations.

Who is not a fit

• People who prefer research work over shipping production systems.
• Candidates who do not want to handle outages or be involved in on-call-style responsibilities.
• Those who avoid debugging under pressure.
• People who need highly detailed specifications before getting started.
• Applicants focused mainly on title, visibility, or résumé value.

Who tends to succeed here

• Engineers who fully own what they build and ship.
• System thinkers who understand the whole pipeline, not just one component.
• Calm problem-solvers for complex and unexpected production failures.
• Technical leaders who demonstrate leadership through action.
• Self-driven people who care about tangible business impact.

Compensation and working setup

The package includes up to USD 2,000 per month along with meaningful ESOP. The role is fully remote and open to candidates based in Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Central Asia, provided they have stable connectivity and an appropriate remote work setup.

You will work directly with the CEO, receive full technical ownership, and help grow a team of 4 to 8 engineers. Progress in this role is measured by ownership and trust rather than job titles.

Additional information

Location: Singapore, Singapore.

Employment type: full-time, remote.

No specific application deadline, start date, number of vacancies, or education requirement was stated.