Director of Engineering

About this role

Outlast https://www.outlast.earth is building the digital infrastructure for the global recyclables industry. We are partnering with major market participants to modernize how materials are traded, financed, and moved through supply chains.

The company has already secured some of the largest commercial contracts in the industry and is growing 3-4x year-over-year while maintaining strong capital efficiency.

We are hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the next phase of the platform: scaling the core systems the business runs on and building the AI-enabled products that embed Outlast deeper into how the industry operates.

ABOUT OUTLAST

Outlast is modernizing one of the largest markets in the world.

The global recyclables industry represents a $1 trillion market that has historically operated with limited technology infrastructure. Outlast is building the digital platform that connects suppliers, buyers, and logistics into a unified ecosystem.

Our platform enables market participants to transact materials seamlessly while providing integrated services including logistics coordination, financing, and quality control, creating a full-stack solution for the recyclables supply chain.

In a short period of time, Outlast has secured some of the largest commercial contracts in the recyclables industry, validating both the scale of the opportunity and the strength of the platform we are building.

The company is currently growing 3-4x year-over-year, a pace that exceeds traditional venture-backed benchmarks, while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital efficiency. Rather than relying on heavy capital burn, Outlast has focused on building a business with strong unit economics and operational leverage from the outset.

As we continue to scale, our focus remains on building technology and systems that allow the business to grow rapidly while operating with increasing efficiency.

THE ROLE

The Director of Engineering will own engineering execution at Outlast.

That means the integrity and scalability of the core platform, the internal tooling that operations, finance, and sales run on, the AI and agent automation that removes manual work from workflows, and the customer-facing products and integrations that embed Outlast with its suppliers and buyers.

This role owns the seams where finance, operations, and commercial systems meet technology: inventory, reconciliation, ledgers, procurement and fulfillment workflows, pricing data, and the integrity that ties them together.

Outlast builds in an AI-native environment where AI writes most of the code. The job is to architect, direct, and review AI-generated systems, not to hand-author them, and to lead a small, high-output engineering team as a player-coach.

The role is based in Salt Lake City, working in person alongside the team and the business, with occasional travel to customers and sites to understand operator workflows firsthand.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

SCALE THE CORE PLATFORM

- Harden and extend the systems where finance, operations, and commercial data intersect: inventory, reconciliation, ledgers, procurement and fulfillment workflows, and pricing data

- Carry platform volume 4x year over year while keeping the data trustworthy

- Identify where systems strain under volume and ship improvements, making the platform the single source of truth for the business

MOVE OPERATIONS ONTO THE PLATFORM AND AUTOMATE IT

- Ship the internal tooling that trading, logistics, finance, and sales teams rely on every day, so the company scales volume without adding headcount

- Replace manual spreadsheets with real platform capabilities, then automate them with agentic workflows that measurably remove human time or improve unit economics

- Own AI observability and cost, including per-feature spend tracking and model selection trade-offs

BUILD CUSTOMER-FACING PRODUCTS AND INTEGRATIONS

- Build the products and integrations that embed Outlast into how suppliers and buyers already operate

- Decide per case whether an agentic flow or an embedded platform experience serves the customer best

- Measure success by effort removed and time saved for the customer, not features shipped

DIRECT AI-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT

- Architect, direct, and review AI-generated systems; AI writes most of the code at Outlast

- Stand up the practices that keep AI-written code correct and maintainable: code review, evals for AI features, deploy discipline, and reliability

- Set the standard for how a small team ships enterprise-grade systems with AI leverage

LEAD AND LEVEL UP THE ENGINEERING TEAM

- Lead a small, actively shipping engineering team as a player-coach, and grow it deliberately as the work demands

- Establish the engineering operating system: delivery cadence, review practices, and reliability standards

- Be the engineering partner the rest of the company relies on, translating the workflows operations, finance, and sales struggle with into shipped automation

QUALIFICATIONS

ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS DEPTH

- Has built systems where finance, operations, and commercial data intersect: inventory, reconciliation, ledgers, procurement and fulfillment workflows, pricing data

- Can describe a system they built across these domains, how it scaled, and what it took to keep the data trustworthy as volume grew

AI AND AGENTIC SYSTEMS IN PRODUCTION

- Has personally shipped AI and agent-powered systems in production, not proofs of concept or demos

- Understands LLM and agent architecture, evals, latency, and cost trade-offs

AI-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT FLUENCY

- Builds primarily by orchestrating AI coding tools: architecting, prompting, reviewing, and shipping AI-written code

- Can describe how AI changed how their team ships and how they keep AI-generated code correct and maintainable

BUILDS FOR NON-TECHNICAL CUSTOMERS

- Track record of building products that non-technical customers actually adopt

- Integrates products into

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