R&D Lead - Founding Team

We are here to build Cloudinary’s next big thing.

We are seeking an R&D Lead to lead the development of Cloudinary for Agentic Commerce, a brand new Cloudinary product. The product focuses on owning the visual and semantic layer that AI agents rely on to understand, rank, and present products. We are a small, fast-moving, and highly independent team with full end-to-end ownership. The opportunity ahead is large: the “front door” of commerce is shifting from websites to AI agents, and merchants must adapt to be discovered, selected, and converted inside agent-driven experiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead and be accountable for all development efforts, with a co-founder / CTO-level mindset
• Co-lead the pod alongside the GM as a true counterpart
• Build a deep understanding of how AI agents consume product data, media, and signals, and how merchants win selection and conversion in this new paradigm
• Starting as a solo developer, you will be responsible for designing and shipping an AI-native product, growing a team when needed
• Leverage Cloudinary’s platform to get to market quickly, building only what meaningfully advances learning and traction
• Continuously adjust technical direction as agent behaviors, protocols, and market assumptions evolve
  
  

• 10+ years of professional experience as a software developer
• 5+ years of experience leading development teams or major technical initiatives
• Experience designing and building AI systems
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools as a core part of daily coding and system design
• Proven ability to rapidly prototype, iterate, and refactor production-quality systems using modern AI tooling
• Experience designing distributed, cloud-based systems
• A background in image or video technologies is an advantage
• A background in the marketing and e-commerce space is an advantage
• Demonstrated ability to operate in high ambiguity and build things that did not exist before - Startup or founder experience is a strong advantage
  
  

• You think in user value and systems first principles, not just features
• A hands-on technical leader who uses AI as a default tool to accelerate thinking, building, and iteration
• Motivated to build new products and systems in ways that were not possible or practical just a year ago
• You are hands-on, humble, and deeply user-centric
• You value ownership, not just responsibility