Firmable is the market-leading B2B sales intelligence platform in Asia Pacific, and we're scaling that success globally at pace. Backed by leading investors and growing 2,000+ customers strong, we exist to give sales teams an unfair advantage: the deepest company and people data of any platform, enriched with real-time signals, served at the right moment by intelligent agents.

The backend services, APIs, and AI systems behind every Firmable product are the engine room of the company. We're looking for the engineering leader who owns that engine room.

The Role

As Software Engineering Lead, you'll own the function that designs, builds, and operates the backend services, RESTful APIs, and AI/LLM systems that power every Firmable product and underpin the application team. You'll lead two engineering pods through their respective team leads, setting the technical bar, the architecture, and the operating rhythm, while staying deeply hands-on yourself.

This role is roughly 70% hands-on architecture and engineering, 30% leadership and cross-functional work. If you're looking to move into pure people-management and step away from the code, this isn't it. If you want to architect large-scale systems, set the standard for how a team builds AI-native, and have the influence to shape the platform end to end, this is your role.

You lead from the front: you can whiteboard the system, write the reference implementation, and then raise an entire team to that bar. Reporting to Head of Data & Services.

What You'll Own

Backend & Services Architecture

• Architect and own Firmable's backend services and APIs in Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, Logfire etc.), the backbone every product and internal agent depends on.

• Design and evolve secure, well-documented RESTful services consumed by the application team, internal agents, and external customers.

• Own database modeling across SQL (PostgreSQL, Snowflake) and NoSQL (DynamoDB): schemas, access patterns, and integrity at scale.

• Drive the architecture for systems that already operate at significant scale and need to go further.

AI / LLM Systems & Evals

• Design and ship production AI/LLM services and agents that are fast, idempotent, observable, and cost-bounded.

• Treat every LLM call as a named, versioned tool, with prompts, schemas, traces, and evals, not an inline string buried in a function.

• Stand up the eval scaffolding (Braintrust, scorers, labelled sets) that gives the application team trustworthy AI features they can ship with confidence.

Scale & Reliability

• Own systems serving millions of API calls: idempotency, caching, per-key rate limits and cost ceilings, circuit breakers, bounded retries, and graceful degradation.

• Set the standard for observability: structured traces, p50/p95/p99 latency by stage, cost per request, and the dashboards that make all of it legible.

Team & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow two engineering pods through their leads; set technical standards and shape how the function operates day to day.

• Be the connective tissue between the Data Platform team, the Application team, and Product, translating early ideas into architecture decisions and working prototypes, fast.

• Run architecture and code reviews, set the bar for quality, testing, and AI-native practice across the function.

What We're Looking For

Must Haves

• 7+ years of hands-on backend engineering, including time leading engineers or engineering leads.

• A track record of building and operating large-scale production systems: you've handled millions of API calls at scale and know what breaks first when load grows.

• Expert Python; deep, production-grade experience with FastAPI.

• Strong experience building AI- and LLM-powered services, APIs, and agents in production, and standing up the evals that keep them trustworthy.

• Hands-on database modeling experience (SQL or NoSQL).

• Proven experience designing and using RESTful services.

• A fully AI-native development workflow: you leverage AI tools for code generation, debugging, and productivity as your default, and stay current with emerging AI tooling. In 2026, this is table stakes at Firmable.

• The ability to lead from the front and architect, from whiteboard to reference implementation to a team operating at that standard.

Highly Valued

• Experience with eval frameworks (Braintrust) and tracing/observability stacks (Logfire, OpenTelemetry etc.).

• AWS and/or GCP at scale (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB).

• Background in B2B data, entity resolution, or high-throughput data/enrichment pipelines.

• Snowflake and modern data-platform tooling.

• Prior startup or high-growth scaleup experience where you've shipped fast and owned outcomes end to end.

How We Build

AI-Native, Not AI-Assisted

Firmable is built on an AI-native engineering philosophy, and we mean it literally. AI isn't a productivity tool bolted onto traditional workflows. AI is the workflow. Every engineer is expected to operate with agentic development, AI-driven test generation, automated review pipelines, and built-in evals and traces as their default mode of working.

If you're not already working this way, this role will require a rapid and genuine mindset shift. We're not looking for people who are open to AI-native development; we're looking for people who already live it, and who can bring a whole team along with them.

The Operating Environment

Firmable runs lean and ships fast, intentionally: small teams, no layers, minimal process, and a weekly release cadence moving toward daily. Teams own their stack end to end: you design it, you build it, you ship it, you run it. The pace is high and the latitude is real; in return you get genuine ownership and a seat at the table on every major architecture decision.

Why This Role

• Own the engine room of one of the fastest-growing B2B platforms in APAC: you're not joining a team, you're leading the function.

• Architectural latitude: the next generation of our services and AI platform is yours to shape.

• Hands-on leadership: the influence of a lead with the satisfaction of still building.

• Massive leverage: your work reaches every Firmable customer, every day.

• Competitive base + meaningful equity.

Firmable is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better products.