Founding Head of Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +4 more states.

📋 Description

• Assume complete responsibility for the product's codebase, architecture, and strategic roadmap.

• Direct the engineering efforts for the AI-native product and oversee technical direction from start to finish.

• Develop and implement AI functionalities, which include LLM-based generation, agentic workflows, evaluations, and production infrastructure.

• Deliver features from initial concept to end-users, making decisions on what to build, cut, or postpone.

• Make critical foundational choices regarding model selection, evaluation frameworks, data and inference pipelines, observability, latency, cost, and quality.

• Create evaluation and observability layers to ensure agentic decisions are justifiable to enterprise customer security, procurement, and legal teams.

• Engage in weekly customer calls and convert customer feedback into actionable product decisions.

• Recruit, interview, and onboard the engineering team.

• Define and cultivate the engineering culture, encompassing aspects such as shipping, code review, failure management, velocity, and fostering enterprise trust.

• Mentor potential hires and establish benchmarks for code quality, review processes, and shipping timelines.

• Collaborate with product and leadership teams on strategy, prioritization, and customer feedback mechanisms.

⛳️ Requirements

• Experience leading engineering teams at scale while intentionally working in a small, hands-on capacity.

• Background as a founding or early engineer at a venture-backed AI startup.

• Proven track record of delivering agentic LLM systems to paying enterprise clients.

• Experience in making decisions regarding rewriting versus maintaining an existing codebase.

• Skilled in hiring and mentoring engineers, with the ability to set a robust early-stage technical standard.

• Deliberately established an engineering culture and enhanced team performance.

• Successfully navigated a regulated procurement process in production, such as security reviews, bias audits, or compliance certifications.

• Proficient in full-stack development across backend, frontend, and infrastructure.

• Capable of bridging customer requirements with the codebase.

• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience with Python is preferred.

• Familiarity with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration platforms is preferred.

• Hands-on experience with major model providers like Anthropic or OpenAI, including migrations, is preferred.

• Developed customer-trusted evaluations.

• Experience in launching AI-native products within regulated industries is preferred.

• Contributions to open-source projects or technical writing in AI/ML are preferred.

• A cover letter must outline what was built, achievements, desired work, and the most challenging agentic-system decision made in the past year.

• Include links to code, projects, or any shipped work.

🏝️ Benefits

• Opportunities for career advancement.

• Fair and transparent hiring practices.

• Alternative assessment methods available upon request.

• An inclusive and accessible recruitment process.

• Accommodations available at any stage upon request.