Chief Architect of Technical Excellence

Head of Engineering Opportunity

At our platform, we're revolutionizing commerce by harnessing the power of AI. We're a dynamic organization that thrives on innovation and speed.

This role is perfect for an exceptional tech-savvy individual who excels in a fast-paced environment where code takes center stage.

Why This Role Exists (and Why Now)

We're entering a pivotal phase of growth, and we need someone who can drive the development of robust systems with real users. The next 12-18 months will be about building a solid foundation that our team can scale from.

If you've ever turned complex problems into working software in days, this could be your next challenge.

What You'll Own in the First 6 Months

• Design and implement AI capabilities: Gen-AI services, prompt orchestration, retrieval, tool/function calling, streaming UX with evaluation and guardrails.
• Build high-throughput content processing pipelines, storage, and delivery with strong observability and cost control.
• Implement consent-driven flows, signed links/tokens, rate-limits, audit trails, and abuse prevention.
• Ingest and normalize external data, model entities/relationships, and expose a clean query layer for apps and partners.
• Ship crisp, modern UIs and APIs for internal/external stakeholders, with performance and reliability budgets.
• Log/metrics/traces, automated tests, incident runbooks, and a sane release cadence.

Success Looks Like

• You ship: Demos weekly, releases bi-weekly, and 'one-pager + prototype' before big bets.
• You teach by doing: You crack the hairy part, document it, and only then scale it through patterns others can reuse.
• You sweat the edges: Correctness, latency, safety, and failure modes matter - especially for AI features.

Your Toolkit

• Core: TypeScript/Node, Python; React/Next.js; Postgres/Supabase; Cloudflare/Vercel; Redis; object storage + CDN.
• AI: OpenAI/Anthropic; vector search (pgvector/Pinecone); pragmatic frameworks (LangChain/LlamaIndex); eval/observability (LangSmith/W&B); prompt versioning and guardrails.
• Data/Infra: Airbyte/dbt or bespoke pipelines; message queues; feature flags; OpenTelemetry/Grafana/Datadog.
• Nice: Framer/WeWeb/Lovable for rapid UI when appropriate; Firebase where it fits.

Must-Haves

• 6-10+ years building production systems as the primary builder (titles < commits). Exceptional earlier-career builders welcome with proof.
• Evidence of turning ambiguous product problems into working software in days, not quarters.
• Hands-on gen-AI experience (retrieval, tools, streaming, evals) with real users — and lessons from failures.
• Strong systems thinking: data models, consistency trade-offs, perf budgets, failure handling.
• Security and privacy instincts: PII handling, consent, audit trails, regulatory awareness.
• Excellent written communication: crisp docs, READMEs, runbooks.

Great-to-Haves

• Media processing at scale (transcoding, adaptive delivery, captioning).
• Marketplace/fintech-style trust & safety (risk signals, abuse prevention, KYC-adjacent flows).
• Data engineering craft: ETL/ELT, entity resolution, schema design.
• Growth engineering: instrumentation, ranking, experimentation.

What You Won't Do (to Start)

• Manage people. This is a player-coach IC role. You'll set the bar via code and patterns, not calendars.
• Architect by slide deck. Your design docs end in merged PRs and measurable user impact.

Career path and title

Start as Head of Engineering. As we scale, choose either:

• Principal/Distinguished IC track (maximize technical leverage), or
• CTO/VP Eng path once a team exists and needs management.

Compensation

Competitive salary + meaningful ESOP. We are biased toward outsized ownership for outsized builders. 4-year vest (1-year cliff); accelerated vesting possible for milestone-based outcomes.

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