Head of Engineering

Pi Security • San Francisco, CA

3d • 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 is 100% onsite in their San Francisco office, emphasizing in-person collaboration with the founding team.

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