Head of Engineering

If you want to shape how product teams think before they build and lead an AI platform from alpha to real-world adoption, this is a rare chance to own both the technical foundation and the company's future from day one.

Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed startup building an AI-powered workspace for product teams. The product helps teams capture early ideas, uncover hidden complexity, and align on what they are building before execution begins. The goal is to prevent great ideas from losing momentum because of rushed decisions or unclear planning.

They have an alpha product live and are actively learning from early users. A small engineering team is already in place, and the company is now looking for a senior, hands-on engineer to take ownership of execution and technical direction as the product moves toward beta and General Availability.

The role
This is a hands-on leadership role reporting directly to the CEO. You will be the first full-time senior engineering leader, with real ownership over architecture, code, and delivery.

In the early stage, most of your time will be spent writing production code. You will design and build the core AI systems, shape the architecture, and set the technical foundations the team will scale on. As the team grows, you will take on more responsibility for hiring, mentoring, and technical direction, while staying close to the product and the codebase.

What you’ll do
- Own technical execution and the engineering roadmap in close collaboration with product leadership
- Design and build AI-powered agent systems that help teams plan, reason, and align
- Write production code daily and stay deeply involved in implementation
- Guide architecture decisions with security, scalability, and maintainability in mind
- Design evaluation and quality practices to ensure reliable AI behavior in production
- Lead the push from alpha to beta and General Availability
- Establish engineering practices, workflows, and a strong technical culture
- Hire and mentor engineers and help create an environment where people do their best work
- Encourage thoughtful use of AI-assisted development tools across the team

What they’re looking for
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with strong hands-on depth in Node.js and TypeScript
- At least 3 years in an engineering leadership role at Director level or similar, ideally in an early or growth-stage startup
- Experience building and shipping AI-powered products, agentic systems, or LLM-based applications in production
- Strong product instincts and experience building tools that people genuinely enjoy using
- Comfort working in ambiguous, early-stage environments and taking products from zero to one
- Experience designing reliable AI systems, including evals, prompt iteration, and quality controls
- Familiarity with modern cloud and serverless platforms, with Vercel experience being a strong plus
- A track record of hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers
- Confidence making trade-offs and prioritizing the highest-risk problems first

Nice to have
- Experience with the Vercel AI SDK or similar agent frameworks
- Background in developer tools, collaboration software, or product tooling

This is a role for someone who wants to help define the product, the codebase, and the engineering culture, and see their work directly shape how teams build together.