Head of Engineering

Pi Security • San Francisco, CA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Pi Security is seeking a Head of Engineering to lead the technical build-out of their agentic product security platform. This is a hands-on leadership role at a pivotal, early stage, reporting directly to the CEO/co-founder. The position involves writing and reviewing code, making architectural decisions, and hiring, mentoring, and shaping the engineering team as it grows. The role requires a strong technical background, experience scaling teams, and the ability to operate in a fast-moving startup environment. The company is focused on helping engineering teams secure software as fast as they build it, using AI to bridge the gap between accelerated code shipping and security review. Pi's platform ingests codebases, past incidents, and pentest history to build institutional security memory, trace vulnerabilities to their root cause, and deliver contextual fixes. They have recently raised $35M to support their growth.

Requirements

• Proven experience as a hands-on engineering leader (e.g., Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, or Staff/Principal Engineer moving into leadership) at an early- or growth-stage startup, ideally having helped scale a team from single digits.
• Strong full-stack or backend engineering background, with the technical depth to be a real contributor, not just a manager — you should be comfortable in the codebase, not just in planning docs.
• Experience building and shipping complex, data-intensive, or AI/ML-driven products, ideally involving large codebases, static/dynamic analysis, or developer tooling.
• A track record of hiring and developing strong engineers, and of building engineering culture and process from a small base.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous startup environment, with the judgment to know when to move fast and when to slow down (especially given the security-critical nature of the product).
• Excellent communication skills — you'll work closely with founders, customers, and a growing team, often translating between technical and business context.
• Willingness and desire to work onsite in San Francisco full-time.

Nice To Haves

• Background in application security, product security, vulnerability management, or a related security domain.
• Experience with developer-tooling integrations (GitHub/GitLab, CI/CD systems, IDE plugins) or with LLM/agentic systems in production.
• Experience at a security-focused company or working closely with security teams as customers.
• Prior experience as an early engineering hire or founding engineer.

Responsibilities

• Own execution of the engineering roadmap end to end, working closely with the CEO/co-founder on product and technical strategy.
• Stay hands-on — writing code, reviewing PRs, and making architecture and design decisions alongside the team, especially in the platform's core systems (codebase ingestion, root-cause analysis, remediation generation, and the Sloane assistant).
• Recruit, hire, and onboard Pi's next engineers, and put in place the processes, standards, and culture that let a small team move fast without breaking things.
• Set technical direction across the stack — backend services, AI/ML pipelines, integrations with customer developer workflows (source control, CI/CD, issue trackers) — balancing speed with the reliability and trust our security customers require.
• Partner cross-functionally with founders on customer-facing technical conversations, including with security and engineering leaders at our customers.
• Build engineering practices (testing, code review, on-call, incident response) that scale as the team and customer base grow, without over-engineering for a startup's current stage.
• Champion security and quality in our own engineering practices — as a security company, how we build has to hold up to scrutiny.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• Work directly alongside the founding team, backed by top investors and security industry leaders.
• A San Francisco office and a team that believes in building together, in person.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed