Product Engineering Lead (QVAC) (100% remote)

As Product Engineering Lead for QV.AC at Tether, you lead the teams that build features and app experience on top of a local, privacy-preserving AI stack. QV.AC is a general-purpose AI assistant that runs locally on devices, giving people real control over their data without cloud dependency or data harvesting. You report directly to the CTO and take direction from product, owning the engineering execution and bar while product owns the direction. The role splits roughly 70% engineering leadership and 30% product.

What you'll do

• Run the app and feature teams day to day: unblock engineers, review work, and keep them shipping.
• Set and hold a high engineering bar for performance, reliability, and clean APIs.
• Own the technical design of features and the API surface between the AI core and the app.
• Ensure your teams work closely with the AI research and deep tech teams on code reviews, design, and anything touching models or inference.
• Work alongside product managers to turn vision and roadmap into scoped, buildable work.
• Push back when scope and reality don't match, and propose better paths when they exist.
• Bring an engineering perspective to product decisions, especially on what local models can do well today and what they cannot yet.
• Help the team move fast, using AI tools and quick prototypes to validate ideas before committing to them.
• Create clarity around team goals and make sure everyone knows what success looks like.
• Mentor team leads to build strong team operating systems, improve how their teams work with others, and grow as leaders.
• Lead by example: roll up your sleeves when the team needs it, and step back when they are ready to own it.

What you bring

• Experience managing engineers or engineering leads who ship consumer products, ideally AI-powered apps.
• Strong product sense: you can tell a good feature from a busy one.
• Intuition for applied AI and on-device constraints including model size, latency, memory, battery, and the gap between a good demo and a reliable feature.
• You use AI tools heavily in your own work and enjoy experimenting with new models and capabilities.
• Deep JavaScript and React experience.
• Initiative, curiosity, resilience, and the ability to give and receive direct critique.

Nice to have

• Experience with local or on-device inference.
• Experience with LLM evals.
• Experience with cross-platform mobile and desktop apps.
• Open source contributions.

About Tether

Tether is a fintech pioneer providing reserve-backed tokens across blockchains, with products including USDT (the world's most trusted stablecoin), energy solutions, peer-to-peer technology, and digital learning platforms. The company operates as a fully remote, global team.