Head Of Engineering

You've been a strong hands-on engineer and you're ready - or already there - to lead. You can architect a system, write production code, and review someone else's work with a sharp eye, but you don't need to be the one typing forever. You know the difference between "I can do this myself" and "I can build a team that does this well," and you're motivated by the second one without having lost the first.
You have genuine, delivered experience shipping AI-integrated systems into production - not pilots, not proof-of-concepts, not a certification. This is a hard filter. You've owned something that had to actually hold up under real usage, and you understand where AI tooling helps, where it creates fragility, and how to harden something that was built fast into something that lasts. If your AI exposure is coursework, side projects, or demos that never saw production traffic, this isn't the right fit.
You're comfortable working next to a product-and-AI function that moves quickly and builds rough - your job isn't to gatekeep their pace, it's to make sure what ships doesn't fall over. You have opinions about engineering standards and you'll defend them, but you're pragmatic about a startup's need for speed over ceremony.
A few things that matter to us:
• You default to building, not managing process for its own sake - even as you scale into leadership.
• You can go from "the only engineer in the room" to "the person hiring the room" without losing your technical edge.
• You have strong instincts for what production-ready AI infrastructure actually looks like, versus a demo that will break under real load.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity in what gets built next, but intolerant of ambiguity in who owns quality and uptime.