Engineering Lead

Engineering Lead

Department: Engineering | Location: Palo Alto HQ | Type: Full-time, On-site

About the Role
We're looking for an Engineering Lead to own a significant area of the Pika platform — leading a pod of engineers while staying deeply hands-on. You'll set technical direction, drive architecture decisions, ship critical features, and raise the bar for the team through mentorship and code review.

Our engineering team is early-stage and growing fast. We need someone who can combine strong individual contribution with the instincts to uplevel everyone around them. Expect to spend 50-60% of your time writing code and the rest leading, reviewing, and unblocking.

What You'll Do
• Lead a team of 3-6 engineers — set priorities, unblock the team, run sprints, and ensure consistent delivery
• Stay hands-on — you're writing code daily, owning major features, and making architecture decisions
• Drive technical architecture — make system design decisions for your area, write RFCs, and build consensus across engineering
• Raise the engineering bar — code reviews, architecture guidance, pair programming, and mentorship for the team
• Own delivery — break down ambiguous product requirements into shippable milestones and hit deadlines
• Collaborate cross-functionally — work with product, design, and research to align technical execution with product vision
• Improve engineering processes — CI/CD, testing, on-call, incident response, and development workflows
• Recruit and grow the team — participate in hiring, onboarding, and building a strong engineering culture

What We're Looking For
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years in a tech lead or engineering lead role
• Strong technical foundation — distributed systems, API design, database architecture, cloud infrastructure
• Proven leadership — you've led teams, mentored engineers, and shipped products through ambiguity
• Hands-on by choice — you lead from the codebase, not just from meetings
• Experience with high-growth startups — you thrive in fast-moving environments where scope changes
• Strong communication — you can articulate technical trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js or Python
• Experience with cloud infrastructure — AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines

Nice to Have
• Experience with AI/LLM products or agent systems
• Experience building real-time, multi-platform systems
• Experience scaling teams from 5 to 20+ engineers
• Previous founding or early-stage startup experience