Lead R&D Engineer (Hybrid)

About the role

A global SaaS leader for seamless digital document workflows, Nitro offers a suite of solutions for PDF, eSigning, identity verification and analytics supported by a best-in-class customer success and change management team. With more than 3 million licensed users and 13,000+ business customers across 157 countries, we serve 67% of the Fortune 500. How We Work: We aim to create an environment where talented individuals are empowered to excel. How we collaborate, innovate, and engage with one another is important to us. Our work is driven by 5 key principles: One team, One mission Our collective dedication to Nitro's mission defines us. Together, we are building an environment where everyone feels like a valued part of something bigger than themselves. Own it We take full ownership of our actions and decisions. We empower one another to lead with confidence, creativity, and a solutions-focused mindset. Accountable to our customers We are dedicated to our customers and take our commitments seriously. We do what we say we are going to do. Excellence in execution Driven by passion and precision, we exemplify excellence in our delivery with innovative, top-quality results. Be bold, fail fast, learn faster We learn as we grow, dare to try, and bravely question. We are not chasing perfection but forever iterating towards it. These guiding values shape our approach to work, fostering a culture where everyone is inspired to contribute their best. We're looking for a Lead R&D Engineer who thrives on building and experimenting, someone who'd rather have a working prototype by Friday than a perfect plan by next quarter. You will help lead a small, high-autonomy team focused on rapid experimentation at the intersection of AI and document workflows. Your job is to explore what's possible through building proof-of-concept products, putting them in front of users, learn from the feedback, and iterate relentlessly. Some things will work and will ship, and some won't. The point is to move fast enough to find the ones that matter and the ones that stick. The learning and the iteration is as important as the outcome. To be clear, this isn't a role for someone who wants to polish requirements docs or have the perfect architecture. It's for someone who can leverage AI to build at pace, who has deep user empathy, who questions the status quo, and who thrives on the ambiguity of figuring out what the right thing to build even is. Your work will span building new web and desktop applications, AI assistants, intelligent document processing, workflow automation, MCP servers, and AI services that integrate with Nitro's API platform and existing products.

Responsibilities

• Helping lead a small R&D team focused on building experimental document workflow solutions, from concept to working prototype
• Rethinking how people work with documents, building and shipping proof-of-concept products fast, gathering real user feedback, and iterating based on what you learn
• Designing and building cloud AI services using modern frameworks and generative AI technologies
• Building solutions including AI assistants, intelligent document processing pipelines, automation workflows, and MCP servers
• Using AI-assisted development tools aggressively to dramatically accelerate how the team builds
• Setting technical direction for the team while staying deeply hands-on
• Collaborating with other engineering teams, product, design, and customer teams to identify high-impact problems worth solving
• Evaluating emerging technologies and pulling them into Nitro's platform where they create real value
• Championing new ideas across the organisation and helping successful experiments and prototypes get to production

Requirements

• A builder first mentality
• Experience building modern software, with strong full-stack skills (JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks, Python)
• Real world hands-on experience building AI or LLM-powered applications not just experimenting, but shipping them
• Deep fluency in modern AI development patterns such as embeddings, RAG, prompt engineering, tool use, agent architectures
• Experience building and deploying cloud-native applications on AWS or Azure
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly prototype and ship working solutions in short timeframes
• Strong architectural instincts balanced with pragmatism
• Comfort with ambiguity - you don't need a detailed brief to get started.
• Experience mentoring or leading engineers, with the ability to set technical direction for a team
• Excellent communication skills you can motivate a team and explain a prototype's value to an engineer, a PM, or a customer
• You actively use AI coding tools to write code faster and to take on full agentic code authoring and have a desire to go even further.
• Bonus points for:
• Previous experience in innovation teams, R&D groups, or startup environments
• You've built something from scratch that people actually use
• Experience with ML mo

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