Tech Lead - Product Engineering

About Basis

Basis equips accountants with a team of AI agents to take on real workflows.

We have hit product market fit, have more demand than we can meet, and just raised $34m to scale at a speed that meets this moment.

Built in New York City. Read more about Basis here.

About The Team

We’re building product experiences where an AI Accountant feels like a capable partner—making complex accounting workflows simple, safe, and trustworthy. That’s our north star.

LLMs put general intelligence inside software, which breaks old product patterns. We’re not building chatbots; we’re designing new human–AI interfaces for real work. Just as mobile-first demanded new UI logic, this paradigm demands new architectures, abstractions, and systems of reasoning.

We work from first principles in small, fast loops, partnering closely with Accounting SMEs, Design, PM, Research, and Platform. We think in systems, prize crisp abstractions and interfaces, and write code that’s observable, operable, and easy for both humans and AI agents to reason about.

About The Role

As a Tech Lead on the Product Engineering team, you’ll hold the technical vision for a product surface or workflow—owning its architecture, quality, and evolution. You’ll define how we build, teach others how to build well, and ensure that every product line you touch is both robust and legible.

Your focus is on technical clarity and architectural excellence: turning ambiguous product ideas into clean, scalable systems that integrate tightly with our ML stack. You’ll lead by example—through code, reviews, and crisp technical reasoning.

You’ll partner with product folks, designers, and accountants to scope what matters most, then lead the technical path to get there.

📍 Location: NYC, Flatiron office. In-person team.

What You'Ll Be Doing:

1. Hold and evolve the product’s technical architecture

• Define and own the architecture for your product area—APIs, clients, data flows, and observability.
• Make sure our systems are legible: clean boundaries, explicit states, and deterministic behavior.
• Run design and PR reviews that raise the bar for structure, performance, and maintainability.
• Make technical trade-offs explicit; document reasoning so decisions compound over time.

2. Ship products that integrate intelligence with precision

• Build interfaces and workflows that blend human input and AI reasoning seamlessly.
• Architect APIs and services that connect product features with ML systems (retrieval, evals, context).
• Ensure systems are instrumented—telemetry, evals, logging—so success is measurable and regressions are visible.
• Keep abstractions clean and “AI-able”: clear contracts, predictable state, no hidden behavior.

3. Lead through teaching and clarity

• Mentor engineers on design, code quality, and system thinking through specs, pairing, and reviews.
• Model clear technical writing—every doc, PR, and review should improve how the team thinks.
• Establish conventions that make the codebase coherent and maintainable as we scale.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to translate business context into simple, testable technical plans.

What You’Ll Bring:

• 5+ years of full-stack or product engineering experience; open to exceptional candidates with varied backgrounds.
• Strong foundations in API design, front-end systems, and reliable backend services.
• Practical experience integrating LLMs or ML capabilities into product workflows.
• Deep comfort reasoning about product architecture, data flows, and system design trade-offs.
• Proven ability to turn ambiguous product goals into clean, iterative engineering plans.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; your specs and PRs are models of clarity.
• Experience with TypeScript/React, Python, and Postgres.
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks, telemetry, and instrumentation.
• Exposure to accounting, finance, or other workflow-heavy domains.
• Prior experience in high-velocity environments (startups or similar).
• A bias toward simplicity, clarity, and architectural legibility.
• Architect: The systems you design are stable, extensible, and easy for others to understand.
• Proven ability to turn ambiguous product goals into clean, iterative engineering plans.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; your specs and PRs are models of clarity.
• Experience with TypeScript/React, Python, and Postgres.
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks, telemetry, and instrumentation.
• Exposure to accounting, finance, or other workflow-heavy domains.
• Prior experience in high-velocity environments (startups or similar).
• A bias toward simplicity, clarity, and architectural legibility.
• Architect: The systems you design are stable, extensible, and easy for others to understand.

What We’D Love To See:

What Success Looks Like

• Teacher: Engineers working with you learn to reason more clearly and design better code.
• Integrator: Product, ML, and platform systems align cleanly through your abstractions.
• Force multiplier: You unblock others, raise quality bars, and accelerate execution without slowing the team down.
• Builder: You operate with clarity, conviction, and care—balancing iteration and craftsmanship.

In accordance with New York State regulations, the salary range for this position is $100,000–$300,000. This range represents our broad compensation philosophy and covers various responsibility and experience levels. Additionally, all employees are eligible to participate in our equity plan and benefits program. We are committed to meritocratic and competitive compensation.