Agent Team Lead

About Orchid

Orchid is a fast-growing startup in the identity infrastructure space, backed by leading investors Team8 and Intel Capital, and with customers from Fortune 500 companies such as Costco and Repsol. Our mission is to redefine how organizations understand and manage identity by addressing real, everyday challenges faced by identity and security teams.

We take a bottom-up approach to identity transformation, starting with deep visibility into how identity actually works across an organization:

• Visualize the pain – Scan applications, analyze their behavior, and surface clear insights into identity management gaps and risks.
• Remediate with confidence — Connect fragmented homegrown and SaaS applications to existing identity infrastructure, turning insights into actionable improvements.
  
  

To support this mission, Orchid has raised a $36M seed round and is building a platform that leverages deep tech and LLMs, and helps companies regain control over identity at scale.

The Role

As an agent team lead, you will be responsible for the agent that runs on thousands of critical customer servers. You will be accountable for agent’s ongoing deliverables with highest level of quality. You will communicate directly with product, support, customer success and other engineering teams.

The agent operates deep inside customer systems, with a systems-level mindset and a high engineering bar for performance, stability, and safety. This is a unique opportunity to build agents that work ‘close to the metal’ in customer environments, where correctness, safety, and performance directly impact customer operations.

The team consists of talented senior engineers with research capabilities, and has two main components

• The agent itself
• The lab that is an infra for testing the agent as a component (component testing)
  
  

The agent team combines strong engineering with a research/security mindset as the scope of work requires reverse-engineering real-world behavior: understanding how operating systems and running applications actually behave, validating assumptions through experimentation, and translating fragmented documentation into robust, production-ready integrations.

Requirements:

What You’ll Do

• Manage a team of talented engineers with a research/security mindset.
• Oversea agent-related features end-to-end – from research, to design, to implementation, to deploying to production.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather and understand system requirements and constraints.
• Be responsible for production-grade code (tests, debugging, profiling) with a high bar for stability, performance, and safety.
• Work in an Agile environment: estimate, plan, and commit to sprint goals; deliver iteratively while maintaining a high engineering bar.
• Maintain high-quality technical documentation and operational runbooks for implemented solutions.
• Partner closely with our Support team by providing the right signals and tooling to triage and manage incidents effectively.
  
  

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience as an engineering team lead.
• At least 3 years of hands-on experience in low-level systems development.
• Strong understanding of user-space operating system concepts, including processes and memory management.
• High proficiency in low-level programming and object-oriented design, especially with modern C++.
• Solid grasp of software engineering fundamentals such as data structures, algorithms, and design patterns.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and debug complex issues in production systems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with great attention to detail.
• Ability to work independently as well as collaborate effectively within a team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated experience delivering high-quality software under strict deadlines.
  
  

Bonus Points

• Experience in managing an engineering and research team.
• Golang proficiency.
• Extensive experience developing agent-like software that runs inside customer systems (on-premise or cloud) and operating in complex production environments.
• Experience with modern language instrumentation frameworks (e.g., Java, C#, Python, Node.js).
• Proficiency in Linux internals or K8s internals.