Head of Engineering

San Francisco, CA
· On-site (5 days/week)
· Full-time

Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity

An early-stage (Seed) company building bespoke AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside Fortune 5000 enterprises. The full platform deploys directly into each client's environment — multi-tenant cloud, dedicated instance, client VPC, on-prem, or fully air-gapped — and every deployment compounds the product. The company is scaling from 1:1 client engagements to 1:many, with an in-flight multi-cloud migration across AWS, GCP, and Azure and a 24/7 support commitment.

Founded 2026
· 11–50 people
· Industry: AI Tools

Run the company's engineering — leading the core platform team and the teams that deliver client implementations — and own the technical direction as the company scales from 1:1 to 1:many. This role stays hands‑on enough to make the hard calls and has a direct path to CTO.

• Lead the core platform team and multiple client-implementation teams, owning the seam between the platform and the implementations, and partner with product owners to run several engagements at once
• Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers and future leads; set code review and reliability standards; build an org that scales from 5 to 50
• Set the architecture and technical bar across the platform and every implementation, make build-vs-buy calls, and translate developments in agent frameworks, tool use, and long-context reasoning into production
• Guide teams building compound agent systems — multi-step orchestration, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation suites, and confidence-gated human-in-the-loop — inside enterprise ERP and CRM software
• Own the multi-client fleet and infrastructure: per-client configuration and isolation across shared-cloud, dedicated, VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped deployments; fleet-wide upgrade and rollback; monitoring, alerting, on-call; plus Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, and Azure

Tech stack: AI agent frameworks (orchestration, tool use, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, human-in-the-loop); multi-tenant backend systems; enterprise integration (APIs, OAuth, connectors, ERP/CRM);
Kubernetes; infrastructure-as-code; multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, Azure.

• Top AI lab or founding eng at AI startup pedigree
• Production AI/ML systems: inference, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring
• 6+ years engineering with 2+ years staff, principal, or founding
• High agency, ownership mentality
• SF Financial District, 5 days in-person

• Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup, comfortable with founding‑team scope rather than a single feature inside a larger org
• Track record of taking full ownership of outcomes across a system, not just their own code
• High agency, moves without waiting for requirements documents or explicit permission
• Comfortable talking directly to business decision-makers such as CFOs, COOs, and ops leads rather than working through layers of product management
• Evaluation and reliability discipline, building eval suites, confidence thresholds, and fail‑closed behavior rather than shipping demos

• Background limited to prompt demos or research-style AI work without production, evaluation, or fail‑closed system experience
• Tendency toward analysis paralysis or over-indexing on process before shipping
• Needs detailed requirements documents or explicit permission before acting
• Pure staff IC background inside a large (200+ person) engineering org without leadership or delivery ownership
• No experience operating software in production for enterprise clients, with no monitoring, on-call, or incident response background

• Founding‑team scope with ownership of the entire technical vision and a direct path to CTO
• Build the platform, not features — every client deployment compounds
• 100% deployment rate with immediate, measurable impact
• Direct access to Fortune 5000 decision-makers

• Location — San Francisco, CA
• Work policy — 5 days in-person, SF Financial District
• Compensation — $200,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity
• Visa sponsorship — None Available
• Employment type — Full-time