Founding Head of Engineering
Skills
DashboardsEngineeringFinancial ServicesHealthcareLarge Language ModelsLeadershipModel Selection
What the job involves
The main requirements, responsibilities and hiring steps.
Requirements
- Led engineering teams at real scale
- Choosing to go small and hands-on now
- Founding or first-few engineer at a venture-backed AI startup
- Shipped agentic LLM systems to paying enterprise customers
- Made rewrite vs keep decisions on an in-flight codebase
- Hired and mentored engineers
- Set an engineering culture intentionally
- Cleared a regulated procurement gate in production
- Full-stack capable across backend frontend and infra
- Comfortable speaking with recruiting and customers
- Excellent communicator across technical and non-technical audiences
Nice to have
- Hands-on
- Small-team mindset
- High standards
- Customer oriented
- Enterprise savvy
Day to day
- Take full ownership of the product's codebase architecture and roadmap
- Lead engineering for an AI-native product and set the technical direction end-to-end
- Build and integrate AI capabilities deeply into the product including LLM generation agentic workflows evals and production infrastructure
- Ship features quickly from rough idea to user-facing product while making strong trade-offs on latency cost and quality
- Build observability and evaluation layers that support enterprise trust security review and customer decision-making
- Recruit interview and mentor engineers while shaping a high-performing engineering culture from day one
- Partner closely with product leadership and customers to translate feedback into technical priorities
Hiring process
- Include a note about what you've built what you're proud of and what you'd want to build with us
- Include 3-5 sentences on the hardest agentic-system call you've made in the last 12 months
- Add links to code projects or anything you've shipped