Head of Engineering
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Overview
Job Description
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.
Automate your job search with Sonara.
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