Lead Software Developer, AI Platform: Kaidera

This position is at Kaidera, a product of Adaptech AI Ltd.

Read this before anything else

Kaidera is the operating platform for enterprise AI, and it is already built and in production. We are hiring the engineer who will lead its development from here and build the team and the process around it.

Three things decide quickly whether this is for you.

1. This is a leadership role, not only a coding role. You will write and review code, but your real job is to build the engineering function: the people, the process and the standards that let a small team ship an enterprise platform reliably.
2. We need someone who has done it before. You have worked inside large engineering teams, you have set up the software development lifecycle for a brand new team from scratch, and you have taken junior developers and made them good.
3. This is an early-stage company. We are closing our pre-seed round before Christmas 2026. The package is a salary plus equity, agreed in discussion, and the work is remote-first.

If any of those is a problem, the rest of this document will not change your mind, and that is fine.

About Kaidera

Kaidera lets organisations build and run software with governed teams of AI Workers. It brings specialist AI Workers, persistent memory, human approval controls, project files and administration together in one platform. It routes work across hundreds of AI models from all the major providers. Kaidera is a product of Adaptech AI Ltd.

The same platform is how we build Total Airport Management, our airport operating system: one AI layer over the 100-plus systems a major airport already runs. So the platform you lead is both a product we sell and the engine we build with.

The role

You will lead software development for the Kaidera AI platform, reporting to Amad Malik, Founder and CTO. Amad built the platform and continues to own the technical direction, product roadmap and AI architecture. You own delivery, engineering quality and the team.

What you will own

Delivery

• The platform roadmap in practice: the customer workbench, AI Worker orchestration, persistent memory, model routing, human approval controls and the admin plane.
• Enterprise hardening as we scale: security, tenant isolation, audit, reliability and performance, for enterprise and airport customers.
• Releases that are boring in the best way: predictable, tested and reversible.

The team and the process

• Design and set up the end-to-end software development lifecycle for the engineering team: intake and specification, planning, branching, code review, testing, CI/CD, environments, release management, incident response and post-incident review.
• Define what done means, make it visible, and make it stick.
• Decide how AI-assisted development fits into that lifecycle, with the review and verification gates that keep quality high.
• Shape the engineering hiring plan, interview candidates and onboard new developers alongside Amad.

People

• Mentor and train up-and-coming developers: pair with them, review their work with care, set growth paths and turn strong juniors into confident owners.
• Build a culture where engineers write down decisions, ask early and learn in the open.

Customers and company

• Work with the CEO and the sales lead on technical scoping, customer deployments and what we can honestly promise.
• Feed what customers need back into the roadmap with Amad.

Your first 90 days

• Learn the codebase, the release lanes and the production setup well enough to improve them.
• Write down and agree the team's development lifecycle, then run the first release through it.
• Ship meaningful hardening work with a measurable result.
• Agree an engineering hiring and onboarding plan with Amad and the CEO.

What we are looking for

Essential: leadership and experience

• Eight or more years building and shipping production software.
• Experience working in large engineering teams and organisations, including coordinating work across several teams or repositories.
• Experience setting up the end-to-end software development lifecycle for a new team: process, tooling, CI/CD, environments, quality gates and release management, and having seen it adopted and sustained.
• A proven record as a mentor: you have trained and developed up-and-coming developers and can point to people you have grown.
• The judgement to explain trade-offs clearly to a CTO, a CEO and a customer.

Essential: technical depth

• Excellent Python: modern, typed, asynchronous Python, with FastAPI, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy and Alembic migrations as the everyday toolkit.
• Strong TypeScript, with React and Next.js on the front end.
• Excellent PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations, query tuning and asynchronous drivers. Our database is PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL.
• API development: designing, versioning, securing and documenting REST APIs, including authentication, authorisation and service-to-service contracts.
• Background and queued work with Redis and Celery, and the reliability patterns around it: retries, idempotency and back-pressure.
• Production experience with containers, Kubernetes and GitOps-style delivery.
• Automated testing and quality tooling as a habit: pytest, Vitest, type checking and linting in CI.
• Hands-on experience building with large language models: provider integration and model routing, tool use, memory and retrieval, orchestration of multi-step work and evaluation of results.
• A security and reliability mindset for enterprise systems: access control, audit, tenant isolation, observability.

Advantageous

• Aviation or another regulated-industry background.
• Experience with vector search and long-term memory for AI systems.
• Experience hiring and building an engineering team from the first hires.
• Open-source contribution or maintenance.
• Experience leading distributed, remote teams.

The right person

A senior engineer who has outgrown pure delivery and wants to build a team and a way of working, not just a codebase. You are equally comfortable reading a production trace, running a retrospective and coaching a developer through their first big feature.

It will not suit someone who wants to code alone, or someone who has only ever joined a team whose process was already built.

Package and working model

• Salary plus equity, agreed in discussion.
• Remote-first, with overlap on European and Gulf working hours.
• Full time.

Next step

If this fits, send a short note on what you have built and led, the development process you have set up for a new team, and the developers you have mentored. We will talk with Amad first, then with the CEO.

Contact: [email protected]