Engineering Lead / Staff Product Architect
This role helps build Lucy, the proactive AI coach from Lucy Labs that lives on your desktop as a cloud-backed app, while the product is in development with design partners.
Owns technical coherence across every Lucy system, hands on.
About the role
At Lucy Labs, this role owns the purpose described below.
The Engineering Lead / Staff Product Architect owns technical coherence across Lucy's Client, Behavior, Knowledge Graph, Governance, Coaching, and Analytics systems. This role is the first technical control point for the Work Modeling architecture: evidence stays separate from interpretation, derived claims carry provenance and confidence, and product surfaces are designed around correction, review, and trust.
This is a senior hands-on architecture role, not a pure people-management role. The person can be the first engineering leader if they still code, review designs deeply, and make cross-system tradeoffs.
The mission
At Lucy Labs, this role's mission is defined by the outcome and work below.
Build the technical spine that lets Lucy prove the evidence-to-work-understanding loop:
- Translate Work Modeling product decisions into buildable architecture
- Keep Client Capture, Behavior Inference, KG/Ontology, Trust, Evals, and Coaching aligned
- Define service boundaries, data contracts, and lifecycle rules before teams scale
- Protect the system from demo-first shortcuts that break privacy, provenance, or reliability
- Establish the engineering review culture for an AI-native product team
What you'd own
At Lucy Labs, this role turns its mission into concrete responsibilities in each area.
1. Cross-System Architecture
For 1. Cross-System Architecture, Lucy Labs expects this role to own the responsibilities below.
- Own end-to-end technical architecture across evidence capture, behavior inference, knowledge graph updates, coaching delivery, and analytics
- Define how raw evidence becomes Actions, Tasks, Goals, Workflows, and Opportunities without collapsing provenance
- Make ADR-level decisions on service boundaries, ownership, contracts, and risk tradeoffs
- Maintain architecture quality while enabling fast product learning
2. Technical Leadership
For 2. Technical Leadership, Lucy Labs expects this role to own the responsibilities below.
- Lead design reviews for core product systems
- Mentor senior engineers across backend, desktop, AI/data, KG, trust, and platform workstreams
- Set engineering standards for specs, tests, observability, release readiness, and incident learning
- Partner with VP Engineering or CTO as the team grows
3. Work Modeling Integrity
For 3. Work Modeling Integrity, Lucy Labs expects this role to own the responsibilities below.
- Ensure inference outputs carry source evidence, confidence, policy state, and deletion/retention lineage
- Keep evidence, interpretation, and customer-specific vocabulary separate enough to audit and correct
- Design correction loops so user feedback updates the right layer of the system
- Prevent silent canonicalization of repeated behavior into business process truth
4. Hiring and Team Formation
For 4. Hiring and Team Formation, Lucy Labs expects this role to own the responsibilities below.
- Help sequence the first Work Modeling engineering hires
- Define technical interview loops for high-context specialist roles
- Build a staff/principal IC path alongside future management structure
- Identify where one person can cover a hybrid role early and where specialization is non-negotiable
What success looks like
Lucy Labs defines these milestones as role outcomes, not metrics for measuring the person.
- 60 days
- Architecture map, core data contracts, and first review gates are in place
- 90 days
- Work Modeling loop has clear technical owners and buildable milestones
- 6 months
- First design-partner system ships without privacy/provenance shortcuts
- 12 months
- Engineering org scales into workstreams without losing architectural coherence
Experience and fit
Lucy Labs looks for the essential experience listed here and treats the rest as helpful, not an automatic barrier.
Must have
- Staff/principal-level engineering experience in complex product systems
- Strong backend/data architecture judgment and production coding ability
- Experience designing systems with auditability, privacy, data lineage, or policy constraints
- Ability to turn ambiguous product strategy into buildable technical plans
- High-context collaboration across product, design, data, security, and engineering
Nice to have
- Experience with desktop capture, process mining, knowledge graphs, or workflow intelligence
- Experience building AI/ML product systems with eval loops and model observability
- Startup founding-team or 0-to-1 architecture experience
- Familiarity with enterprise trust requirements, SOC 2, GDPR, and deletion propagation
How you work
Lucy Labs looks for these working traits alongside technical experience.
Role DNA
Lucy Labs evaluates these traits as part of the fit for this role.
- Systems thinker
- High-agency builder
- Precise but pragmatic
- Comfortable challenging weak architecture
- Protective of user trust and product truth
Apply for this role
The Lucy Labs application form opens with this role already selected. You can review the message before sending it.
Apply for this roleFrequently asked questions
Is this role open at Lucy Labs?
Yes. Lucy Labs confirmed this role is open on 25 August 2026.
Where does Lucy Labs base this role?
Lucy Labs bases this role in Madrid, Spain. The exact working arrangement is confirmed during the application conversation.
What does this role own at Lucy Labs?
At Lucy Labs, this role has one central responsibility: Owns technical coherence across every Lucy system, hands on. The full description sets out the mission, responsibilities, and relevant experience.
How do I apply to Lucy Labs?
At Lucy Labs, use the application form. The role is selected automatically, and you can review it before sending.
