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. This is a rare opportunity to be the senior technical voice at a company pioneering software-only approaches to cognitive health and performance.

What You'll Do

Partner directly with the Founder to define and evolve technical strategy and product roadmap

Stay deeply hands-on: write and review code, make architecture calls, 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

What We're Looking For

Required

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

Nice to Have

Native mobile development (iOS/Android), or managing teams who do

Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, agentic systems, or LLM-based products

Background in consumer health or wellness technology

The ideal candidate is high energy, low ego, and deeply mission-driven — equally comfortable in a product strategy conversation and a code review, and energized by the challenge of building something genuinely new.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 – $220,000 USD annually

Meaningful equity package

Full benefits

Flexible PTO

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be willing and able to work from the San Francisco office. Visa sponsorship is not available.