Tech Lead

About Board of Innovation

BOI partners with large, ambitious organizations to design and build applied AI products that create measurable business impact. We help enterprise and scale-up clients move beyond experimentation by embedding AI directly into their operations, decision-making, and products. Our work spans industries, but always centers on production-ready AI, strong engineering, and real-world adoption.

About the Role

We're looking for a Tech Lead to own the technical side of our most demanding AI builds, end to end. You step in the moment a client request lands, shape the scope and the solution with the team, turn it into an architecture and a build plan, lead the engineering through project delivery, and be the client's technical counterpart until the system runs in their environment.

This is a senior, on-project engineering role. Our builds typically run for several months, with three to five BOI engineers, inside the client's own cloud environment. You make the technical decisions within your projects, running one flagship build close to full-time or two or three smaller builds at once, depending on the portfolio. You report directly to our Engineering Director.

What You'll Do

You lead the technical delivery of enterprise AI builds, from agentic systems and LLM-powered services to the platforms around them, deployed into clients' own environments. The work runs in four strands.

Shape the solution. When a request lands on one of your accounts, you work out with the team what to build, how, with whom and in how many weeks. You write the technical side of the proposal and defend the estimate. Occasionally you do the same for a new deal, when a pitch needs an engineer who can credibly say how it will be built.

Lead the build. You own the architecture, make and document the decisions that shape it, review the team's work, and keep client stakeholders aligned on progress, trade-offs and risks. The engineers on the project look to you for direction, and you give it.

Build where it matters. When the critical path needs it, you build it yourself, whether that's a prototype that proves an approach in days, a hard integration, or a fix nobody else can land. What you ship is production-grade.

Carry the client. You're the technical voice in the room. You explain what we're building and why to people who don't write code, you earn their confidence that we can deliver, and you handle the realities of a large organization, from approvals and platform teams to security reviews and politics. You know when to push, when to work around, and when to escalate.

Between builds, you work on the internal tooling and templates that make every BOI engineer faster.

What You Bring

Experience. You have 5+ years of engineering experience, including at least two in which you technically led a build and the engineers on it, ideally for clients who were not technical themselves. You've taken systems from a design on paper to production in someone else's environment, and you know what that costs.

Applied AI depth. Your core strength is applied AI engineering, meaning agents, tool use, retrieval, MCP, evals and the orchestration around them. You've shipped LLM-based systems into production and have opinions about reliability, cost and evaluation that came from being burned. Our Engineering Director covers the deep ML side, so the best complement is someone whose instincts sit in systems, agents and delivery.

Engineering fundamentals. Python, CI/CD, testing, review discipline and infrastructure-as-code are second nature, and you use AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code, Codex and MCP-based workflows fluently, with the guardrails that keep generated code production-grade. Real production cloud experience, Azure preferred, and experience deploying inside locked-down enterprise environments are a big plus.

Communication and judgement. You can explain an architecture to a VP in five minutes and hold a client room without a project manager running interference for you. You're creative in finding a path when the obvious one is blocked, you build trust fast, and you know what to decide yourself, what to flag, and when to escalate.

People management and hiring sit with the Engineering Director. You mentor the engineers on your projects, and the role can grow toward team-level leadership over time.

How You Work

You treat a build as yours. You make decisions and own them, keep the people who depend on you informed in writing, briefly and regularly, and ask for help early when the commercial or people side of a project needs it.

You're at home in a consulting environment, where each engagement brings a new domain, a new client culture and a new set of constraints, and you work in the open with strategists, designers and consultants.

The field moves quickly, and so do we. You pull in what's useful, bring it back to the team, and push back when something doesn't make sense.

Contract & Setup

You're based in Lisbon or elsewhere in Portugal, where our engineering team sits. We're open to permanent employment and long-term contractor arrangements, and the final setup depends on your situation and local compliance requirements. We'd like you to start in November 2026.

Interested?

Apply with your CV and a short note on a build you technically led, what went wrong, and what you'd do differently. Bonus points for something we can actually look at.