Tech Lead - AI & Product Engineering

About Datastraw:

Datastraw Technologies is an AIOps company helping businesses transform their operations into AI-first operations. We build the systems, infrastructure, and intelligence that enable businesses to automate, optimise, and scale how work gets done.

We're building the infrastructure behind customer experience for modern consumer brands, bringing together customer conversations, workflows, knowledge, automation, and AI to make CX operations more intelligent, efficient, and scalable. We're now building the technology layer that powers this.

Our internal platform brings together customer conversations, brand knowledge, workflows, AI-assisted responses, operational data, and third-party systems into one place. The goal is to make CX teams significantly more efficient while giving brands better visibility and control over their customer experience.

We're still early in this journey, which means there is a lot to build.

The Role:

We're looking for a Tech Lead who wants to take ownership of building and scaling Datastraw's technology function.

This is not a role where you'll inherit a large engineering team and an established architecture.

We have an early-stage product, a working internal CRM, process automations, and several integrations already in place. What we need now is someone who can bring engineering discipline and structure to what we've built, continue building the platform, and gradually build a strong technology team around it.

You'll work closely with the founders, operations team, and CX teams to understand real customer and business problems and turn them into technology solutions.

You will be expected to be hands-on technically while also taking increasing ownership of architecture, engineering processes, technical decisions, and team development.

What You'll Own:

Build & Scale the CX Platform:

• Take ownership of the architecture and continued development of our internal CRM and CX platform.
• Build new product capabilities across customer conversations, agent workflows, automation, reporting, and AI.
• Design reliable systems that can support multiple brands, teams, and workflows.
• Improve the existing platform rather than constantly rebuilding from scratch.
• Identify technical debt and progressively improve code quality, reliability, and maintainability.

AI + Customer Experience:

AI is a core part of where we are taking Datastraw. You'll work on applying AI to real CX problems, not just building generic AI features.

This could include:

• AI-assisted customer response generation.
• Brand/SOP/knowledge-base retrieval.
• Agent copilots.
• AI-based conversation analysis.
• Automated escalation and routing.
• AI voice and chat experiences.
• Customer intent and sentiment understanding.
• Workflow automation.
• Evaluation and monitoring of AI responses.
• Building systems that combine human agents with AI.

We're particularly interested in someone who is genuinely curious about how AI can change customer experience operations.

Integrations & Infrastructure:

Our platform connects with multiple systems across the CX ecosystem.

You'll work with integrations such as:

• WhatsApp and messaging platforms.
• Email/ticketing systems.
• Shopify Admin API.
• Meta WhatsApp API.
• Instagram Graph API.

You'll also work across:

• React.
• Supabase.
• PostgreSQL.
• Supabase Auth.
• Edge Functions / RPCs.
• Webhooks.
• Qdrant.
• OpenRouter.
• DeepInfra.
• LLM and AI APIs.

You do not need to have worked with every technology listed above.

What matters is that you have strong engineering fundamentals and can understand, evaluate, and work across a modern product stack.

Bring Structure to Engineering:

We are intentionally looking for someone who enjoys creating structure where there currently isn't enough of it.

You'll help establish:

• Development workflows.
• Git and branching practices.
• Code review processes.
• Documentation.
• Testing standards.
• Deployment processes.
• Monitoring and logging.
• Security and access controls.
• Technical documentation.
• Product/engineering prioritisation.
• Incident management.
• Technical planning and estimation.

The expectation is not to introduce process for the sake of process.

The expectation is to build simple systems that allow a small team to move quickly without things breaking.

Build & Grow the Tech Team:

As Datastraw's technology function grows, you'll play an important role in building the team.

You will:

• Help define who we need to hire and when.
• Interview and evaluate technical candidates.
• Mentor junior engineers and interns.
• Establish expectations around engineering quality and ownership.
• Delegate effectively while remaining close enough to the technology to make good decisions.
• Help create a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous learning.

Technology Strategy & Cost Ownership:

• Own Datastraw's technology roadmap and help translate business priorities into technical priorities.
• Help manage the technology budget, including infrastructure, APIs, AI/LLM usage, third-party tools, and other technology costs.
• Be accountable for ensuring our technology stack is cost-efficient, scalable, and fit for purpose.
• Regularly evaluate technology vendors, infrastructure, and tools to identify opportunities to optimise costs without compromising reliability or product quality.
• Make thoughtful build-vs-buy decisions and establish appropriate guardrails around technology and AI spend.
• Track technology costs as the platform and customer base scale, and proactively flag areas of increasing or unnecessary spend.

What We're Looking For:

You could be a strong fit if you:

• Have 2–5 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Have worked as part of a product or engineering team before.
• Have experience taking ownership of features or systems from idea → development → deployment.
• Are comfortable working in an early-stage or fast-changing environment.
• Have strong backend and API fundamentals.
• Understand databases, authentication, APIs, webhooks, and integrations.
• Have experience with React and modern web application development.
• Have worked with PostgreSQL or a similar relational database.
• Have experience with cloud-based platforms such as Supabase, AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar.
• Have an interest in AI/LLMs and have experimented with or built AI-powered features.
• Can make sensible technical trade-offs rather than over-engineering everything.
• Are comfortable reading existing code and improving it.
• Can communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Enjoy mentoring and helping other engineers grow.
• Are naturally organised and enjoy bringing structure to messy problems.

You'll Be a Particularly Strong Fit If You Have:

• Experience building internal tools, SaaS products, or B2B platforms.
• Experience with AI/LLM applications in production.
• Experience with RAG, vector databases, or knowledge retrieval systems.
• Experience building AI agents or agent-assist systems.
• Experience integrating WhatsApp, Shopify, or other commerce/CX platforms.
• Experience working with Supabase, PostgreSQL, and serverless/edge functions.
• Experience leading a small engineering team or mentoring junior developers.
• Experience working in a start-up or an environment where you had significant ownership.

What We Don't Need:

We are not looking for someone who:

• Has only worked on very narrowly defined tickets.
• Needs a fully established engineering organisation around them.
• Is primarily interested in people management and no longer wants to code.
• Wants every technical decision to already be made for them.
• Equates good engineering with building complex systems.
• Is interested in AI only because it is currently popular.

We need someone who can look at an imperfect system and think: "I can make this better."

Your First 6 Months at Datastraw:

First 30 Days:

• Understand the existing CRM, architecture, codebase, and integrations.
• Understand how Datastraw's CX operations actually work.
• Identify major technical risks and bottlenecks.
• Establish basic engineering practices.
• Start contributing directly to the product.

30–90 Days:

• Take ownership of the technology roadmap with the founders.
• Improve reliability, documentation, and development workflows.
• Ship meaningful improvements to the CRM and AI capabilities.
• Start establishing a repeatable engineering process.
• Identify the first key technology hires.

3–6 Months:

• Own the technical direction of the platform.
• Build and mentor the initial engineering team.
• Improve scalability, observability, and security.
• Develop a clear architecture for Datastraw's AI + CX platform.
• Establish a strong foundation for the next stage of product development.

Why Join Datastraw:

This is an opportunity to join Datastraw's core team at an early stage and have meaningful ownership over the company's technology direction.

You won't simply be implementing someone else's technical roadmap. You'll help shape the architecture, establish the engineering function, make technology decisions, build the team, and ultimately help define how technology and AI power Datastraw as the company scales.

You'll have the opportunity to:

• Shape the architecture of a real product.
• Build AI applications around a genuinely interesting problem space.
• Work directly with founders and CX operators.
• Build a technology team from an early stage.
• See your work being used every day by CX teams and real customers.
• Help define how AI changes the way customer experience is delivered.

If you're a strong engineer who wants to grow into a technology leader while still being close to the code, this is the kind of environment we're building.