Technical Lead, Applications

Department: A1 Engineering

Location: China

Employment Type: FullTime

About A1

There are over 5 billion users using basic applications today such email, notes, tasks that are not AI-native. Our mission is to build a proactive smart assistant for everyday users to bring intelligence to conversations, errands, organising and workflows, with minimal prompting.

Our product focuses on achieving high reliability for long-running workflows, persistent context, and real-world task completion. The system must handle multi-step reasoning, interact with external tools, and remain reliable despite non-deterministic model behavior. Our objective is to help users complete tasks daily enjoyable with over ~90%* reduced time.

Role

As Technical Lead, Applications, you directly own the core application architecture that connects AI systems to real-world user experiences. You are responsible for the design, reliability, and evolution of backend services, APIs, and client integrations across mobile and desktop.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.

Focus

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.

• Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.

• Ensure production-grade reliability: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.

• Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.

• Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behavior, and graceful failure modes.

• Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.

• Make high-impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.

• Establish a strong execution culture through code reviews, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.

• Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.

• Balance speed and discipline – shipping quickly without compromising long-term system quality.

Ideal Experiences

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.

• Strong hands-on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.

• Experience delivering AI-powered products, with a deep understanding of model integration trade-offs.

• Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.

• Comfort operating across platforms (backend, mobile, desktop), even if your depth is in one.

• Proven ability to make high-impact technical decisions under ambiguity.

• A strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real-world usage.

• Move fast without breaking fundamentals

Outcomes

• Production systems are observable, monitored, and stable under real-world load.

• Decisions consistently balance speed, cost, reliability, and user experience.

• Features across backend, mobile, and desktop work smoothly and reliably.

• Latency and reliability improve measurably over time.

How We Work

The best products today in the world were built by small, world class teams. We are a high talent density and hands-on team. We make decisions collectively, move at rapid speed, striking a balance between shipping high quality work and learning. Joining our team requires the ability to bring structure, exercise judgment, and execute independently. Our goal is to put in hands of our users a truly magical product

Interview process

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach to schedule 3, but no more than 4 interviews.

Applications are evaluated by our technical team members. Interviews will be conducted via virtual meetings and/or onsite.

We value transparency and efficiency, so expect a prompt decision. If you've demonstrated the exceptional skills and mindset we're looking for, we'll extend an offer to join us. This isn't just a job offer; it's an invitation to be part of a team that's bringing AI to have practical benefits to billions globally.