Head of Engineering (Deputy CTO)

Sapience AI Corporation•Seattle, WA

17d

About The Position

Sapience AI is the collective intelligence platform for professional communities. We sit above the CRMs, AMS platforms, and knowledge bases that organizations already run, and we turn the expertise scattered across them into something every member can search, act on, and share. The intelligence a collective needs is already inside it. Most organizations just cannot reach it. Knowledge lives in silos, in legacy systems, in the heads of a few experts, and in fragmented records no one can connect. We change that. Our work is grounded in four commitments: technology elevates people and never replaces them, the best expertise is already inside the community, everything is built on trust, and every deployment is purpose-driven for the organization it serves. Let’s achieve more, together. This is the senior-most engineering role at Sapience AI. You own the technology, the architecture, and the engineering organization that build the collective intelligence platform. You are accountable for MINERVA and the COGENT architecture: how they are designed, how they scale, how they stay trustworthy, and how quickly the organization can ship. You set technical direction and build the team that delivers on it. You sit on the executive team, translating company strategy into technical strategy and back, and making the calls that determine whether Sapience AI can build what it has promised. Collective intelligence at the scale of professional communities is a hard systems problem: reasoning over messy knowledge, earning trust, protecting sensitive data, and doing it reliably. Someone has to own whether the technology can actually deliver on the vision. In an AI market moving this fast, the durable advantage is an engineering organization that learns and ships faster than the field, on an architecture that can carry the next several years. The Head of Engineering supplies that. You own the technical strategy, the architecture, the team, and the standards, and you are accountable for turning ambition into a platform that works and holds trust.

Requirements

Extensive engineering leadership experience, including leading and scaling engineering organizations.
Deep technical background in large-scale systems, and hands-on credibility that engineers respect.
Direct experience building and operating AI or ML systems in production.
A track record of owning architecture that scaled with a growing business.
Strong judgment on security, privacy, and reliability for sensitive data.
Executive presence, and the ability to translate between business and technical strategy.
A record of attracting, growing, and keeping strong engineers.
Modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and large-scale infrastructure.
Distributed systems, data platforms, and ML infrastructure.
LLM, retrieval, vector, and graph systems at an architectural level.
Observability, security, and reliability tooling.
Engineering delivery and planning systems.
Cost and capacity management for AI workloads.
Deep familiarity with the MINERVA platform and COGENT architecture (as the accountable owner).
Prior senior engineering leadership (VP Engineering, CTO, or equivalent) at a software or AI company.
Experience scaling both an architecture and an organization through growth.
A track record of shipping and operating AI systems in production.
Experience partnering at the executive and board level.

Nice To Haves

Experience with neuro-symbolic systems, knowledge graphs, retrieval, or agentic AI.
Experience owning inference and infrastructure economics at scale.
Experience in trust-sensitive or regulated domains.
Familiarity with CRM, AMS, or knowledge-platform ecosystems.
Experience as a technical co-founder or early engineering leader.

Responsibilities

Own the technical strategy that turns company goals into a platform that can deliver them.
Set a clear technical point of view on where AI is heading and how Sapience AI should build for it.
Make the build, buy, and bet decisions that shape the next several years.
Own the architecture of the MINERVA platform and the COGENT neuro-symbolic system, and how they scale.
Ensure the architecture can carry growth, new communities, and rising demands on reasoning and trust.
Balance near-term delivery against the durable foundations the platform needs.
Build, structure, and lead the engineering organization, including hiring, leveling, and leadership development.
Set the bar for engineering craft and hold it.
Create an environment where strong engineers do the best work of their careers.
Own how the organization plans, ships, and learns, and keep it fast without breaking trust.
Drive delivery through GR and GA milestones with clear accountability.
Remove the blockers that slow the whole organization down.
Own the security, privacy, and reliability of a platform holding sensitive community knowledge.
Make trust a property of the architecture, not a review at the end.
Be accountable for how the platform behaves when it matters most.
Partner with research and applied AI to turn frontier capability into dependable product behavior.
Decide which advances are ready for production and which are not yet.
Keep the organization honest about what AI can and cannot do.
Serve on the executive team, and translate between company strategy and technical reality.
Give the board and leadership a clear, honest view of technical risk and opportunity.
Partner with product on what is possible, and by when.
Own the economics of running the platform, including inference and infrastructure cost at scale.
Build the operational discipline that keeps a growing platform reliable and affordable.
Make scale a planned outcome, not a recurring emergency.
Lead an organization that treats AI as part of how it builds.
Set the standard for using AI to raise engineering velocity and quality, from code to review to operations, and make sure judgment and accountability stay with people.
Ensure human in partnership: AI accelerates the work, you own the judgment, the interpretation, and the call.
Attract, grow, and keep engineers who do their best work here.
Ensure the platform runs reliably at a cost that scales with the business.
Ensure research and applied AI advances become production behavior members can rely on.
Provide leadership and the board with an honest view of technical risk and opportunity.
Partner most closely with the CEO and executive team, Product, Research, Applied AI, and Security.
Lead the engineering organization and be accountable for how MINERVA and COGENT are built, scaled, and trusted.