AI / Full-Stack Engineer Full Time NEW

We’re looking for a production-minded software engineer to join us as an early member of the engineering team in Lebanon, working directly with the CTO Matt McCann (US/EST) and Chief Scientist Hadrien Glaude (France).

About Zaqa

Industrial businesses run on back-office operations — processing orders, managing documents, entering data, running compliance — work that consumes enormous amounts of skilled staff time without directly growing revenue or improving customer relationships. We automate it.

Zaqa is the agentic back-office for industrials. We build AI systems that handle the undifferentiated operational work that keeps people busy but holds them back — so our customers’ teams can focus on growing their business and better serving their own customers.

We are VC-backed and early-stage. Our systems are live with paying customers and handling tens of millions of dollars in customer order flow.

https://zaqa.ai

About the Team

Our founder, Pierre Checrallah, grew up in Lebanon, attended Harvard Business School, and founded Zaqa out of his experiences working industrial customers on behalf of Strategy&.

Our CTO, Matt McCann, worked on satellites at NASA, built and successfully exited a computer vision startup, and led Amazon AGI’s reinforcement learning LLM training teams alongside our Chief Scientist, Hadrien Glaude.

Our engineering team is lean and committed. Reliability isn’t a nice-to-have. Our customers are industrial businesses that depend on our software to run core back-office operations. When systems fail, their work stops.

The founding team previously led teams building large-scale production systems, an experience that brings an operating style centered on ownership and autonomy. Engineers are trusted with real responsibility, expected to reason about systems, and supported directly by the technical leaders as needed.

How We Work

We practice a high ownership engineering model, inspired by the founding teams experiences leading teams at Amazon. We explain the customer problem and relevant system context. You propose a design or approach. We review and give feedback. You implement and own the outcome

You won’t be micromanaged or given detailed tickets. You also won’t be left alone — the technical leaders are available to discuss design decisions and help unblock issues. We expect thoughtful reasoning and responsibility, not perfection. Clear thinking and learning from mistakes matter more than always being correct on the first attempt.

In This Role, You Will

• Diagnose and resolve production failures, tracing issues from symptoms to root cause
• Own and improve integrations with external APIs, ERP systems, and email-based workflows
• Ship targeted, well-tested changes to production systems used by real customers
• Improve observability and reliability across asynchronous workflows
• Build new product features across the backend and frontend
• Collaborate directly with the founders to understand customer problems and turn them into system improvements

Ownership

You won’t just contribute code — you’ll own systems.

We will define clear areas of responsibility (for example: document processing pipelines, integrations, or workflow reliability). Within those areas, you’re expected to investigate issues, decide on fixes, and improve how the system operates day-to-day.

You are not expected to set company technical strategy or design the core AI architecture. Your responsibility is making systems dependable, understandable, and maintainable in production. As your scope ownership grows, you will have the opportunity to learn about building and training large-language models in production environments.

You’ll Be a Strong Fit If You

• Have working Python and TypeScript skills (our stack is React, FastAPI, Postgres, AWS).
• Can debug systems you didn’t write by reading logs, tracing state, forming hypotheses, and verifying them
• Have integrated with external APIs and understand what makes them fail
• Take responsibility for problems rather than handing them off
• Communicate clearly in writing, especially when explaining what went wrong and why
• Are comfortable working without detailed task lists
• Care about reliability and correctness
• Have experience with Docker and ideally some exposure to AWS or another cloud environment
• Are excited by the opportunity to grow into a technical leader at an early-stage company
• Comfortable with coding agents, git, and software testing across the full spectrum (unit, integ, load, e2e, etc)

Helpful but not required:

• Asynchronous or distributed systems experience
• Applied AI experience (agentic systems, dense embedding search, etc.)

Important Reality of the Role

This is a production role. Occasionally, customer-impacting issues require investigation outside of regular working hours. We aim for a sustainable pace, but reliability matters and some problems cannot wait until the next morning. If you enjoy ownership and solving operational problems, you’ll likely enjoy this role. If you prefer narrowly defined tickets and fixed scopes, this role will not be a good fit.

You’ll be expected to maintain a minimum working hours overlap with US EST. In practice, that means working 11am – 7pm Lebanon time. As you integrate into the team and demonstrate independent ownership and delivery, we can accommodate schedule flexibility.

Interviewing Expectations

We use coding agents extensively across the company, but we have strong conviction that pure vibe-coding is not enough for success. We expect you can write cogent, well-structured abstractions during a live coding exercise without AI assistance. You should be able to think through problems algorithmically, on your own without AI assistance. You can expect that we will exercise these expectations during the interview process.

Compensation

Above market salary + equity. We want the best engineers in Lebanon on our team.