Head Of Engineering - AI Assisted Food & Bev Development (Zucca)

Pioneer Square Labs•Seattle, WA

14d•Hybrid

About The Position

Head of Engineering – Zucca (Seed-Stage Generative AI Startup in Food & Beverage) 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.

Requirements

You like to ship fast and often!
You’re a player-coach: you enjoy building and you also enjoy building teams, systems, and clarity.
You’ve led engineering execution in an early-stage startup environment—hiring, planning, and shipping through ambiguity.
You’re a strong full-stack generalist, comfortable across modern frontend and backend systems, and able to jump into the codebase when needed.
You create high-velocity engineering environments without over-processing—simple rituals, clear ownership, and strong accountability.
You’re a great communicator and natural problem solver, who thrives in environments with ambiguity and async collaboration.
You build teams that use AI tools thoughtfully and consistently—raising throughput and quality while keeping a high bar for correctness, security, and maintainability.
You bring a pragmatic, iterative mindset, delivering customer value quickly while planning for long-term scalability.
You like being close to the customer, gathering and synthesizing feedback to design and implement solutions that increase retention and overall customer satisfaction.
You are deeply curious about AI-driven products, excited to explore how AI can fundamentally transform F&B product development.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Lead Zucca’s engineering execution end-to-end: translate product priorities into a clear delivery plan, run a lightweight operating cadence, and ship predictably.
Build and manage a small, high-performing engineering team (4–6 engineers near-term), including hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management.
Stay hands-on: contribute directly to critical-path work, unblock engineers, and maintain high technical credibility through code reviews and targeted implementation.
Increase velocity and quality of output by establishing pragmatic engineering operations: planning/reviews, release hygiene, incident response, and lightweight metrics (cycle time, deployment frequency, defects, reliability trends).
Instill AI tools as a core part of daily engineering practice to drive productivity and quality: establish norms for AI-assisted development (design, coding, testing, debugging, documentation), maintain guardrails for security and correctness, and continuously improve our workflows through lightweight experimentation and measurement.
Partner closely with Zucca’s architectural lead to maintain architectural coherence as we scale—ensuring we balance speed and quality without accumulating invisible debt.
Own sequencing and resourcing tradeoffs within engineering: make deliberate calls about tech debt, refactors, scalability work, and reliability investments based on business needs and risk.
Collaborate cross-functionally, partnering with product, design, and business teams to define and prioritize work that matters—especially in the context of customer pilots.
Build and maintain a highly secure application, incorporating best-practice security measures such as encryption, rigorous access controls, and secure coding standards.