Head of Engineering

Mantel is building AI agents to transform the $500B US home services industry. We’re a super lean and fast-growing startup based in NYC and we’re looking for a Senior/Staff Software Engineer to be our Tech Lead.

Selling home services is broken. Contractors juggle clunky tools. Homeowners are paralyzed by expensive, confusing decisions. That’s why we built Mantel. Our flagship product, Smart Quote, brings AI directly into the sales conversation—generating custom quotes, answering technical questions in real-time, and automating follow-ups.
We've grown 750% YoY
and already serve top contractors across the country, including the largest garage door company in the United States.

We're two MIT alums—Kevin (CTO) founded and exited a YC-backed startup (acquired by Lyft), and Zac (CEO) went to Harvard Law but found his calling in tech—building a merry band of exceptional builders in Manhattan.

Our goal? Become the preeminent sales software for the entire home services industry, where each contractor can create the most user-friendly, personalized, and convenient shopping experience for homeowners. Think of it as the Shopify for the trades.

You'll work directly with Kevin to own our technical direction and mentor our engineering team of 3.You'll make architecture decisions that matter, ship AI-powered features daily, and take on more ownership than most roles offer in five years.
We're offering 1%+ equity
because we want you to feel, and be, truly invested.

• Own the entire codebase and drive our technical architecture.We want you to be a true technical lead, which means making the key architectural decisions that will shape how our product and software grows.
• Build and ship AI-powered features.Recent examples: we just shipped an AI agent that personalizes proposals based on homeowner interests. Next up: an AI agent that’s personalized to each salesperson’s tone and style and helps them build proposals from scratch and respond to customers on their behalf. You'll also build new AI-powered shopping experiences for homeowners—like an agent that walks them through choosing between heat pump options based on their home specs and budget.
• Mentor 3 engineers and help establish the engineering culture that will define Mantel for years.We already use AI extensively in our development process (we ship faster than teams 3x our size), but we expect you to push us to new heights as AI tools evolve weekly.
• Talk to customers in the field
  - contractors and homeowners. The best product decisions come from understanding the problem firsthand. You'll ride along on sales calls and watch people use your code.
• Ship meaningful code every day.We move fast. You'll own projects end-to-end from design to deployment.
• Scale backend services (Python/Django) as we grow.If you have frontend skills, you'll ship web products too.

• 5+ years building and scaling production systems
• Technical leadership experience - you've mentored engineers or led technical projects
• Extremely strong technical skills - we need someone we can trust to own the entire codebase
• Python proficiency and backend chops
• Bonus: hands-on AI/LLM experience, Django/Postgre
  
  SQL, AWS, full-stack capabilities, startup experience

• Obsessive about ownership.By default, you own 100% of everything you touch. You follow threads to their logical conclusion without others asking you to. You don't do partial fixes.
• An independent thinker.You make sound decisions with minimal oversight. You balance moving fast with building things that last.
• Driven by learning rate.You believe startups win in the 0→1 phase by understanding customers better than anyone else, not by mindless execution.
• Genuinely excited about AI.You've built with LLMs at work or in your own time. You have opinions about what works and what doesn't, and you always stay on the bleeding edge of AI technology as it continuously evolves and transforms our industry.
• A Future Founder.You want the challenges and opportunities of building from the ground up, and want to come to a place to learn how to do it better than anyone else.

We want someone who brings obsessive…