Senior AI Product Engineer / Technical Lead

Location: Remote

Type: Contract-to-hire

Hours: 20-30 hours/week

Rate: $40-$85 USD/hour, based on experience and trial performance

Start: Paid trial, then 30-day contractor pilot

ABOUT HIRE BRIAN

Hire Brian helps owner-led businesses turn scattered workflows, documents, reporting, follow-up, and operational knowledge into reliable AI-assisted systems and standalone applications.

We build practical software for businesses that are outgrowing spreadsheets, manual follow-up, disconnected apps, and "the owner just remembers how everything works."

This is not an AI demo shop. The work is software, operations, and business judgment first. AI is used where it makes the system faster, clearer, safer, or more useful.

THE ROLE

We are looking for an AI-native software product engineer who can take messy business problems and turn them into working systems.

You will work directly with Brian, who owns client strategy, discovery, executive relationships, workshops, sales, and final decisions. Your job is to turn that strategy into reliable software: internal tools, workflow systems, dashboards, integrations, AI-assisted processes, and client-specific apps.

This starts as a contractor role with a paid trial and 30-day pilot. If the fit is strong, the intent is to build a long-term relationship, with a mutual option to discuss a full-time or deeper technical leadership role after 12 months.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

- Improve student-facing practice software with real progress, credits, lessons, and parent visibility.
- Continue MES-style operational software for manufacturing, logistics, or trailer businesses.
- Replace spreadsheet-driven workflows with small, reliable internal apps.
- Build AI-assisted systems for intake, reporting, document handling, follow-up, routing, approvals, and status visibility.
- Connect APIs, databases, auth, file storage, webhooks, and third-party business tools.
- Turn repeated client patterns into reusable Hire Brian components over time.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN




- Convert ambiguous business discovery into scoped software plans.
- Decide what should be an app, automation, workflow, report, AI assistant, or human process.
- Build full-stack features in existing and new systems.
- Work across TypeScript/JavaScript, React/Next-style frontends, Python/FastAPI-style backends, databases, APIs, auth, and deployment.
- Use AI coding tools aggressively, but with senior engineering judgment.
- Use LLM APIs for structured output, retrieval, tool use, human approvals, evaluations, and workflow automation.
- Improve existing codebases without unnecessary rewrites.
- Add or improve tests for important behavior.
- Handle logging, failure modes, fallback behavior, deployment notes, and operational documentation.
- Protect secrets, client data, credentials, and production environments.
- Tell Brian when something is risky, unclear, overbuilt, under-specified, or not worth building.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE
- 5+ years of production software engineering experience.
- Strong full-stack product engineering judgment.
- Strong TypeScript/JavaScript and modern web app experience.
- Backend experience, preferably Python.
- Experience with databases, APIs, auth, deployment, debugging, and production maintenance.
- Real experience shipping internal tools, SaaS features, workflow systems, dashboards, or line-of-business apps.
- Practical AI/LLM development experience beyond prompt demos.
- Experience with AI coding tools such as Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, or similar.
- Clear English communication.
- Comfort working directly with a founder/strategist from incomplete requirements.
- Ability to explain technical tradeoffs in plain English.

STRONG SIGNALS




- You have built software used by non-technical operators.
- You have inherited messy systems and made them safer.
- You know when automation should stop and ask a human.
- You can design the workflow, data model, UX, and implementation path.
- You can tell when AI-generated code is wrong.
- You can ship quickly without being reckless.
- You can create a useful product plan from a messy conversation.
- You care about reliability: tests, logs, permissions, rollback, docs, and handoff.

NOT A FIT This is probably not a fit if:
- You mostly build AI demos, chatbots, or prompt experiments.
- You need perfect specs before making progress.
- You blindly trust AI-generated code.
- You rewrite systems before understanding them.
- You avoid tests, logging, documentation, or production-readiness work.
- You are casual with customer data, credentials, or private repos.
- You want Brian to be the technical safety net.
- You only want tickets, not product ownership.

WHAT TO SEND WITH YOUR APPLICATION Please include material that shows previous work.
- GitHub, portfolio, technical writing, product demo, Loom walkthrough, or shipped product links.
- One sanitized example of a business-facing system, internal tool, dashboard, wiki, course portal, automation, or AI workflow you personally built or substantially improved.
- A short explanation of the problem, your exact contribution, the stack, what users did with it, and what made it production-ready.
- If the work cannot be shared publicly, a redacted screenshot, architecture note, walkthrough, or sanitized write-up is fine.

Strong examples include company wikis, client portals, internal sales dashboards, paid ads dashboards, online course/training portals with videos and worksheets, and AI workflows with human approval.

APPLICATION QUESTIONS

Please include

1. Location and time zone.
2. Proposed hourly rate in USD.
3. Weekly availability for the next 90 days.
4. Reliable Central Time working overlap

5. Demo of your work

📌 Senior AI Product Engineer / Technical Lead (Colombia)
🏢 Hire Brian
📍 Colombia