Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Optimal is an early-stage, venture-backed AI company building agentic systems that transform how technical teams work. The Founding AI Quality & Release Engineer will build and own the end-to-end verification and release system, including AI-powered testing, automated release gates, CI/CD pipelines, and reliable environments.
Responsibilities
- AI-powered verification - The trustworthiness of the test signal: agent-run harnesses, LLM graders, regression coverage, and automated release gates. Closing the gaps that let bugs escape to customers
- Release and environment engineering - The mechanics of shipping: release pipelines, CI health, artifact publication, and the reliability of demo and staging environments
Skills
- 1. United States
- 2. Canada
- Must have full work authorization in the US or Canada - No visa sponsorship or transfer support available
- • 7+ years as a quality, release, or platform engineer
- • Hands-on AI-native quality engineering (testing or evaluating agentic / LLM-based systems) within the last 12 months
- • Strong GitHub Actions and GitHub-based CI/CD (container builds, pipeline automation)
- • Python and/or TypeScript
- • Startup / scale-up experience
- • Happy as a pure hands-on IC who writes code most days
- • 7 - 15 years across quality, release, or platform engineering
- • Proven experience building, testing, or evaluating systems where AI agents do the actual work
- • Deep GitHub Actions / GitHub CI/CD (container builds, pipeline automation)
- • Python and/or TypeScript (flexible on language for the right person)
- • Experience with containerized infrastructure and modern CI/CD practices
- • Track record of taking full ownership of a process or system - deciding and executing independently
- • Startup mindset with the autonomy to make and implement decisions without close guidance
- • Comfortable owning trustworthiness of test signal in an AI-native environment
- • Strong software engineering depth - this is an engineering role, not traditional QA
- • Familiarity with a major cloud or data platform (AWS, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks)
- • Modernizing legacy QA / DevOps practices inside a larger org
- • Building internal AI-assisted tooling (test generation, log analysis, agent workflows)
Benefits
- Meaningful equity
- Fully remote (US or Canada)
- Optional office space for those who want it
Company Overview