Technical Director (Temp to Hire)

Instrument is a digitally native design and technology company built to help brands unlock their full potential. Since 2005, our team of makers, thinkers, and storytellers has partnered with leading brands like Google, Nike, Uber, OURA, and Eventbrite to craft digital experiences that create impact and drive results. We don't just design — we build. Our work lives at the intersection of taste and technology across three core offerings: Brand, Marketing, and Product.

The Project:

We are developing a highly complex, stateful, multi-agent simulation engine driven by generative AI. This is a greenfield project exploring new forms of non-linear, narrative-based user interaction at scale. Unlike typical stateless web apps, this system requires a dynamic, real-time frontend that can handle persistent 'memory' and evolving session states for thousands of concurrent users. We are building an architecture where multiple AI agents orchestrate complex logic on the backend, and the frontend must elegantly reflect that state and latency to the user.

The Role:

You will serve as the Technical Director, responsible for driving the technical vision, quality, and execution of this project. While this is a brand-new application, you won't be starting from a completely blank slate. Our architecture team has spent the last 10 weeks establishing a robust backend foundation, defining core services, and proving out the initial generative AI architecture. You will be stepping in at a pivotal moment to take the helm just as the full engineering team (Backend, Frontend, and AI Engineers) ramps up. Your focus will be on guiding this team, scaling the established foundation, and driving the project to a successful, polished launch.

This engagement runs from 6/1-10/9 at 40 hours/week, with the intention to convert to full-time if it's a strong mutual fit.

What You'll Do:

• Own and evolve the technical vision, building on an existing GCP architecture (Cloud Run, Firestore, Cloud SQL) and guiding integration with a modern Angular-based SPA
• Lead architectural decision-making across the stack, ensuring scalability, performance, and maintainability of a real-time, stateful system
• Drive delivery health by evaluating feasibility, identifying risks early, and shaping scope to support sustainable execution
• Mentor and unblock a senior, multi-disciplinary engineering team; actively participate in sprint planning, standups, retros, and architectural reviews
• Uphold code quality across backend and frontend systems
• Act as the technical bridge across Engineering, Design, Strategy, and Production — translating AI capabilities into actionable product and UX decisions
• Partner with clients and external teams as a senior technical advisor
• Collaborate closely with the Executive Technical Director
• Establish best practices for AI-augmented engineering, guiding the use of tools like Gemini, Cursor, or Claude Code to accelerate development responsibly
• Apply deep expertise across full-stack development, systems architecture, and GCP to scale a complex, distributed system

What You'll Bring:

• Proven experience as Technical Director, Principal Engineer, or Architect leading complex multi-disciplinary teams
• Deep full-stack fluency (TypeScript, Angular/React/Vue + Python, async processing, distributed services)
• Strong expertise in JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python
• Advanced experience architecting and deploying on GCP, including containerized microservices, database design (SQL/NoSQL), DevOps/IaC (Terraform)
• Experience bringing generative AI systems into production with understanding of latency, orchestration, and multi-agent architectures
• Solid security, deployment, monitoring, and systems operations foundation
• Strong communication skills
• Familiarity with generative AI technologies (LLMs, agentic systems)
• Collaborative, low-ego leadership style

Pay Range:

Contract: $113-130 per hour (W-2)
Full time: $150,000 - $180,000 (Base ranges adjusted by region: US1 +15%, US2 +7.5%, US3 Base)