Chief Engineer (Sweat Equity Only)

Chief Engineer | Location: [USA or India/Remote] Commitment: Part-time to start, evolving into full-time status Equity: Rightful sweat-equity stake for the right partner About Athena: Athena is pioneering Analytics-as-a-Service through a true "Services-as-Software" model: an enterprise-grade AI engine that embeds seamlessly into our clients’ IT environments, delivering real-time insights and decision intelligence without heavy consulting or custom builds. We’re creating a new category and need a visionary technologist to lead our architectural foundation. About Us: We’re a fast-growing tech startup revolutionizing the analytics consulting space with our outcome-based analytics-as-a-service platform in the fast emerging "Services as Software" category. We aim to deliver an enterprise-grade, secure, and scalable system to our clients while fostering an environment of innovation and agility. Role Overview: As Chief Engineer, you will be the technical cornerstone of Athena. You’ve shipped data and AI systems at scale—on-prem and in the cloud—and you love turning cutting-edge research (model context protocols, agentic AI) into hardened production services. You’ll architect, build, and own every layer of the platform, from data ingestion and security through multi-agent orchestration to performance-critical decision APIs. Key Responsibilities:

• Platform Architecture & Roadmap
• Define and evolve Athena’s microservices architecture for scalability, resilience, and low latency.
• Lead adoption of Model Context Protocols to ensure every AI workflow understands its data and business context.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI/ML frameworks and agentic AI paradigms.
• Data & Integration Infrastructure
• Design robust connectors for any data source—relational, NoSQL, streaming (Kafka/Kinesis), APIs, and third-party feeds.
• Architect hybrid batch/streaming ETL pipelines that support real-time analytics and model training.
• Ensure schema flexibility and versioning to support diverse client environments.
• AI Orchestration & Guided Agents
• Build the runtime for agentic AI: multi-agent coordination, reinforcement-learning loops, and safe human-in-the-loop handoffs.
• Implement policy engines for contextual decisioning, auditability, and regulatory compliance (particularly in financial services).
• Security, Compliance & Reliability
• Embed enterprise-grade security: OAuth2/OpenID SSO, fine-grained RBAC, encryption at rest/in transit, and immutable audit logs.
• Define and enforce SLAs/SLOs; implement chaos testing, canary deployments, and full-stack observability (logs, metrics, tracing).
• Lead SOC2/ISO-27001 alignment and regular security reviews.
• Team Leadership & Culture
• Mentor and scale a high-caliber engineering team—instill a “you build it, you run it” mindset, DevOps best practices, and strong automation discipline.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Customer Success to translate business needs into production-ready features.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and shared ownership.

Qualifications & Experience 10+ years building and operating large-scale data and AI systems in production, including in regulated industries (financial services preferred). Deep expertise in distributed systems (microservices, Kubernetes), streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis), and modern data stores. Hands-on with MLOps, Model Context Protocols, or similar AI governance frameworks. Proficient in Go, Python, or Java, with strong software craftsmanship and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible). Experience architecting and shipping agentic AI or guided-agent orchestration platforms. Strong track record of embedding security and compliance at every layer. Why Athena? Category Creator: Lead the technology behind a platform redefining a $100B consulting industry. High Impact: Your work will directly empower CXOs to move from months-long analytics projects to real-time, AI-driven decisioning. Innovation Playground: Opportunity to experiment with the latest in AI, data engineering, and software architecture. Ownership & Autonomy: Shape every aspect of the platform and build the team that brings it to life. Apply Job!