Founding Engineering Lead
About the job
- A track record of shipping software that is an excellent product and adopted by its intended users, rather than merely shipped to specification.
- Comfort owning and communicating delivery timelines, including flagging risk before it becomes a surprise.
- Strong communication skills with technical peers and non-technical stakeholders, including a CEO.
- Experience with AI-native, large language model- or retrieval-augmented generation-powered products.
- Help share and own the roadmap and delivery of internal research-enablement tooling by working with research and sourcing teams to understand their workflows and meaningfully reduce the time needed to produce a report.
- Commit to delivery dates for engineering's key initiatives, meet them, or flag slippage early and clearly.
- Partner with the existing engineering team on architecture decisions, including the move toward direct application programming interface/model context protocol access for customers.
- Report directly to the CEO as a technical thought partner on product and roadmap tradeoffs.
- Establish the engineering processes, including planning, review, and ownership, that a growing team needs.
- Help design and run the technical interview process as the team scales.
- Experience leading and scaling engineering teams, ideally at an early-stage seed or Series A startup rather than primarily at a large or big-tech company.
- Exposure to designing external application programming interface or model context protocol-style developer surfaces.
- Comfort evaluating and evolving an existing codebase and architecture built by an early engineering team.
About the company
Altis is a New York venture-intelligence firm that provides institutional-quality outside-in diligence on private companies raising Seed through Series D+. It operates by building shared research infrastructure for venture capital investors, including expert interviews, surveys, and key-debate synthesis. These research products are structured as a fund expense rather than a management-fee cost. Altis’ coverage targets foundational questions about market size, product, and competition that investors need to understand before making investment committee (IC) decisions. The company differentiates itself by offering practical, shared diligence assets that aggregate expert insights and debate into a common research workflow, reducing duplicative effort across portfolios. Its goal is to help VC teams make more informed, faster investment decisions through rigorous, scalable diligence grounded in real-world expertise.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Seed
Total Funding
$10.5M
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2019
Get referred to Altis
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Altis launched out of stealth on February 18, 2026, with its first reports.
- It hired Jason Seu as founding Chief Research Officer, strengthening research credibility.
- LinkedIn showed 589 followers on September 19, 2026, signaling early market pull.
What critics are saying
- Altis had 1-10 employees on LinkedIn in September 2026, limiting delivery capacity.
- No public customer logos, revenue, or retention data prove repeatable demand.
- PitchBook, Tegus, and incumbents can bundle similar diligence faster and cheaper.
What makes Altis unique
- Altis sells IC-grade primary research, not scraped-news AI summaries.
- Ben Sun and Chris Freeberg pair venture access with McKinsey-style diligence rigor.
- Altis synthesizes expert interviews into the 2-4 debates investors actually decide.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
- Health Insurance
- Stock Options
- Meal Benefits
- Company Equity