Head Of Engineering - Zucca (Vertical AI For Food & Beverage Cpg)

Head of Engineering - Zucca (Seed-Stage Vertical AI for Food & Beverage CPG)

Seattle Hybrid

About Zucca

Product launches in the food and beverage (F&B) industry are complex and costly, with teams often working in silos, relying on sequential handoffs, and struggling with misaligned goals. This leads to rework, delays, and failed launches-even though more than 30,000 products are launched every year, many still take 18+ months to develop and never reach their potential.

Zucca is a seed-funded AI platform built by product developers for product developers, designed to connect CPG product teams, integrate workflows, and guide smarter decisions at every step from idea to shelf. With Zucca, F&B companies can launch smarter and faster, with fewer cycles and clearer trade-offs, turning costly complexity into catalytic clarity.

With Zucca, teams can:

• Ingest and manage ingredient specifications
• Align workflows in a collaborative, secure workspace
• Make faster decisions with real-time, auditable data
• Reduce bench cycles and rework by connecting ideation, R&D, sourcing, and scale-up
• De-risk production by surfacing variables early and avoiding costly delays

The Role

As Zucca's Head of Engineering, you'll lead and grow the engineering function while staying hands-on as a builder. You'll be accountable for execution: turning product priorities into predictable shipping, leveling up engineering velocity and quality, and building the team and operating system required to scale from a small team into a high-performing org.

You'll work closely with the founding team to shape the technical foundation and engineering culture of the company.

We're looking for someone with a proven track record in fast-paced, early-stage environments, with the ability to ship quickly, think strategically, and own outcomes end-to-end. This role is ideal for a player-coach who can balance execution and quality, enjoys mentoring and building teams, and wants to shape the future of food innovation through AI.

What You'll Do

• Both lead and ship! This is a strategic role that is also heavily hands-on.
• Own Zucca's engineering outcomes end-to-end. Convert company priorities into an execution plan, run a simple weekly cadence, and deliver on schedule with high quality.
• Be the team's highest-leverage engineer. Stay close to the code: tackle critical-path work, set the technical bar via reviews, and remove blockers fast.
• Build a small, elite team (4-6 near-term). Hire, onboard, coach, and hold a high performance bar-no passengers.
• Install an execution system that scales. Lightweight planning, clear ownership, release discipline, and incident response-measured with a few signals (cycle time, deploy frequency, defects, reliability).
• Make AI-assisted development the default. Establish norms, tooling, and guardrails so engineers move faster without sacrificing correctness or security; continuously improve via small experiments and measurement.
• Own technical tradeoffs with business judgment. Decide what to build now vs later across tech debt, refactors, scalability, and reliability-based on customer impact and risk.
• Ship with customers, not just at them. Partner tightly with product/design/business to run pilots, iterate quickly, instrument what matters, and translate learnings into roadmap.
• Build trust through security-by-default. Bake security into engineering practice (least privilege, secure SDLC, threat-aware reviews, strong access controls, encryption where appropriate, and incident readiness).

We're Excited About You Because

• You ship fast and often-and you care about the bar. You balance speed with reliability, maintainability, and security.
• You're a true player-coach. You write code, unblock critical paths, and simultaneously build the team, systems, and clarity that make shipping repeatable.
• You've led engineering in an early-stage startup. You've hired, planned, and delivered through ambiguity, making smart tradeoffs without waiting for perfect requirements.
• You're a strong full-stack generalist. Comfortable across modern frontend and backend systems, and able to jump into unfamiliar parts of the codebase and make meaningful improvements quickly.
• You build high-velocity environments without bureaucracy. Simple rituals, clear ownership, tight accountability, and a bias to action.
• You communicate clearly in async-first workflows. You write well, keep stakeholders aligned, and turn messy problems into concrete next steps.
• You make AI-assisted development a default. You help teams use AI tools thoughtfully and consistently to increase throughput and quality-while maintaining guardrails for correctness, security, and maintainability.
• You're customer-close. You seek out feedback, synthesize it into product/engineering decisions, and deliver improvements that drive retention and satisfaction.
• You're excited about AI-native products in F&B. You're deeply curious about how AI can reshape product development workflows-and you want to build that future at Zucca.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience scaling an engineering team from early stage through the next phase (e.g., 3-5 engineers to 8-15+).
• Experience with generative AI products, including evaluation/regression practices for AI behavior and quality.
• Background building data-intensive platforms or complex workflow products.
• Familiarity with security best practices for auditable and protected data environments.

Why Join Zucca?

• Early-stage impact: Shape foundational decisions, systems, and the culture of a high-potential startup.
• Work at the intersection of food innovation and AI: Transform the $2T F&B CPG industry with cutting-edge technology.
• Collaborative, mission-driven team: Built by product developers for product developers, with a focus on transparency and inclusion.
• Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Benefits: 100% paid health benefits for employee and 50% for family, and 401k
• Flexible work environment: Hybrid collaboration in Seattle.

Diversity & Inclusion

Zucca is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We prohibit discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected status.