Head of Engineering

San Francisco, CA (Financial District) · On-site · Full-timeCompensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity

About the Company

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

Founded 2026 · 11–50 people (Seed) · Industry: AI Tools

The Role

The Head of Engineering runs the engineering org, leading the core platform team and the teams that deliver client implementations. The role partners with product owners to run multiple engagements simultaneously and owns the technical direction that determines whether the company becomes a generational platform or remains a services business — staying hands-on enough to make the hard calls and jump in where it counts as the company scales.

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.

Requirements

• Pedigree from a top AI lab or as a founding engineer at an AI startup
• Experience building production AI/ML systems — inference, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring
• 6+ years of engineering, including 2+ at staff, principal, or founding level
• High agency and an ownership mentality
• On-site in San Francisco's Financial District five days a week

Nice to Haves

• Prior founding-engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup, comfortable with founding-team scope rather than a single feature inside a larger org
• A track record of owning outcomes across a whole system, not just your own code
• Moves without waiting for requirements documents or explicit permission
• Comfortable talking directly with business decision-makers such as CFOs, COOs, and ops leads
• Evaluation and reliability discipline — eval suites, confidence thresholds, and fail-closed behavior rather than demos

Why Join

• Founding-team scope: own the entire technical vision with a direct path to CTO
• Platform, not features: build the core platform every client deployment compounds
• Immediate, measurable impact: a 100% deployment rate into Fortune 5000 environments, with direct access to enterprise decision-makers
• Compounding leverage: systems that improve with every customer

Details

• Location — San Francisco, CA (Financial District)
• Work policy — On-site, 5 days/week
• Compensation — $200,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity
• Visa sponsorship — Not available
• Employment type — Full-time