Lead Engineer: Agent Academy

Who we are:
At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.

Our values:

• Listen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.
• Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.
• Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.

At Focused, our Engineers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role would play a crucial role in shaping and implementing engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients, we develop trust and influence - we are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for how we deliver success for clients.

What would you be doing?

• Writing lots of code
• Lead teams through end-to-end delivery across the stack, from backend services to modern web UIs.
• Set the technical direction for client engagements and be the go-to escalation point when things get tricky.
• Pair program daily with teammates and clients to share knowledge, improve code quality, and grow together.
• Practice TDD and continuous refactoring, and own the testing strategy for the codebase, including deciding what not to test.
• Guide architecture decisions to support scalability, observability, and performance, including deployment, IAM, and observability design for containerized systems.
• Collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software.
• Map business value to engineering effort so clients can make good tradeoffs.
• Coach developers on the team through pairing, mentoring, and modeling healthy engineering culture.
• Drive incremental process improvement through retros and day to day feedback.
• Influence technical direction beyond the team, working across client orgs and Focused's internal practices to share lessons, shape approaches, and raise the collective bar.
• Stay curious through experimenting with new patterns in the GenAI space, share what works (and what doesn't), and help evolve how we build AI-powered software.

We are excited about you, because you:

• You're a hands-on, full stack engineer with a strong track record of delivering software in collaborative, agile environments.
• You have experience leading engineering teams and feel confident mentoring and supporting other developers.
• You're proficient in Python and/or JS/TypeScript (Ruby or similar works too), and you have real opinions on repo layout, dependency management, config, and tooling that you can back up.
• You've diagnosed and fixed real concurrency problems in production, whether async/await or thread-based.
• You believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You've owned a testing strategy, from unit and integration tests to regression suites and CI gates.
• You've designed the deployment, IAM model, or observability for a containerized system on a cloud provider, and you've taken a system through a scaling inflection.
• You've worked across a range of company sizes, from startups to enterprise, and have experience navigating complex organizations, building bridges across functions, and helping teams adopt modern development practices.
• You know how to read the room, when to push and when to hold back, and you can handle difficult stakeholders without losing the relationship.
• You're proactive. You see problems coming and raise them before they turn into fires.
• You're as comfortable in the code as you are in a client meeting and can translate technical risks and wins into language anyone can understand.
• You're excited about what's happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value.
• You love to share what you're learning and make the team around you better.

Nice to have:

• Exposure to LLM APIs or agent frameworks
• Experience building AI-enabled applications with LangChain and LLMs that deliver production-ready outcomes for clients
• Deep expertise in LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith
• An understanding of how to architect AI-native systems responsibly and effectively

If you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have:

• Led a team through building and launching a new client product, from first commit to production
• Tracked down a deadlock in a production service and put guardrails in place so it wouldn't happen again
• Designed the IAM model and observability setup for a client's move to containers
• Helped a client's platform handle a big jump in traffic without missing a beat
• Stepped in as the escalation point when a client's priorities shifted mid-engagement and got everyone aligned on a new plan
• Ran a retro that changed how the team approaches code review
• Mentored a Senior Engineer through setting technical direction on a project for the first time
• Helped write this job req

What to know before you apply:

• This is a contract-to-hire role. It starts with an 8 week program followed by a one month evaluation period, for a total of about 3 months.
• During the program, you'll be required to earn the LangChain Certified Agent Engineer certification and the Claude Architect certificate.
• Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this program.
• This role requires being in our Chicago office three days per week.
• This is an hourly position for the duration of the contract, with a pay range of $85 to $100 per hour. Final rate will be based on experience and skill level.