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Head of Engineering
Job Summary
Join an early-stage biotech team as a Founding Engineering Lead and player-coach with 5-10 years of experience scaling startups through Series A and B. Own the technical direction across the full stack, from agentic AI systems to web applications, while building a high-performing engineering team. This role offers hands-on coding alongside strategic leadership to drive product quality and rapid iteration grounded in customer needs.
Essential Functions
- Build, lead, and grow the engineering team through hiring, setting technical standards, and developing engineers.
- Stay hands-on by writing production code, reviewing pull requests, and debugging with the team.
- Own technical direction across the full stack, including agentic systems, RAG pipelines, and data infrastructure.
- Establish engineering practices and culture enabling a small team to ship quickly while maintaining customer trust.
- Partner with founders on roadmap and strategy, aligning technical decisions with customer requirements.
- Scale engineering from 1-10 or 10-100 engineers in fast-growth environments.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of full-stack or backend-leaning engineering experience at VC-backed tech startups.
- Proven track record scaling teams from 1-10 or 10-100 at top-tier tech companies.
- Experience building monitoring, alerting, and quality evaluation systems at scale.
- AI efficiency expertise; ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Technical undergraduate degree from a top 20 school.
Preferred Qualifications
- Mix of big tech and startup environments.
- Health tech or pharma tech experience.
- Proficiency in TypeScript and Next.js.
- VC-backed experience with strong engineering culture.
- Full stack experience, backend leaning.
Technical Skills
- Full-stack development
- Backend engineering
- Agentic AI systems
- RAG pipelines
- Data infrastructure
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Monitoring and alerting systems
- Quality evaluation frameworks
- Production code deployment
Education & Certifications
Technical undergraduate degree from a top 20 school required.
Compensation & Benefits
Competitive base salary range of $250,000 - $350,000 annually, depending on experience, plus equity in an early-stage biotech venture. Hybrid work model in San Francisco, CA.