Head of Engineering

About the role

A seed‑stage neurotechnology startup in San Francisco is hiring a Head of Engineering – a founding leadership role for someone who can set technical direction and still ship code every day. You’ll partner directly with the Founder to define product strategy, own the full engineering stack, and build the team and culture from the ground up.

Key responsibilities

• Partner directly with the Founder to define and evolve technical strategy and product roadmap.
• Stay deeply hands‑on: write and review code, make architecture decisions, and set the bar for engineering quality.
• Own and harden backend infrastructure for security and scale.
• Establish engineering workflows, principles, and code‑quality standards the team can grow into.
• Lead technical hiring and build engineering culture from the ground up.
• Work cross‑functionally with product, science, and design to ship quickly and iterate based on real user feedback.
• Translate fuzzy product goals into clean technical decisions, including through user research and experiment design.

Required profile

• 2–6 years of experience in fast‑moving startup environments, preferably in consumer software or AI‑native products.
• Former founder or founding engineer with proven experience shipping a consumer product from 0→1.
• Hands‑on individual contributor comfortable owning end‑to‑end engineering as the senior technical voice.
• Experience with voice/audio processing and building software products around voice data.
• Proficiency in Swift/macOS desktop, iOS, and Python for ML/data pipelines, plus cloud backend (AWS or GCP).
• Strong product instincts – comfortable with ambiguity, user research, metric analysis, and experiment design.
• Eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

Required skills

• Swift
• macOS
• iOS
• Python
• AWS
• GCP
• Voice/audio processing
• Machine‑learning/data pipelines
• RAG pipelines
• LLM‑based product development

What we offer

• Base salary: $180,000 – $220,000 USD annually.
• Meaningful equity package.
• Full benefits.
• Flexible PTO.
• On‑site role in San Francisco, CA (must work from the office).