Head of Engineering

Jona•,

49d•$225,000 - $270,000•Remote

About The Position

At Jona, we’re transforming how clinicians and consumers understand and optimize their gut microbiome. Our AI-powered platform decodes complex microbiome data and translates it into actionable insights—supporting better outcomes, stronger immunity, and longer health spans. We’re looking for a player-coach, hands-on Head of Engineering to help us scale our core product. You’ll lead a small, high-performing team while staying close to the code—shipping features, shaping architecture, and bringing AI-powered capabilities into production. This is a high-impact role: you’ll influence product direction, define how we build, and help turn ideas into real, user-facing systems fast.

Requirements

10+ years of software development experience
3+ years of building and shipping modern AI-enabled web applications or platforms in production
Experience leading small engineering teams and mentoring engineers while remaining highly hands-on
Strong full-stack skills (TypeScript, React, Node.js)
Experience designing scalable APIs and working with production databases, especially PostgreSQL and other SQL systems
Experience with Docker/containers
Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience
Solid experience with AWS and owning cloud/platform maturity
3+ years of experience deploying and operating ML/AI systems in production
Strong familiarity with MLOps practices, including model lifecycle management, monitoring, deployment, and data/model pipelines
Comfortable owning ambiguous problems and moving quickly
Strong product instincts—you care about what gets built, not just how
Exposure to regulated environments (e.g., healthcare/HIPAA)

Nice To Haves

Experience in health-tech and can communicate well with science/clinical stakeholders
Experience in healthcare or a regulated data background is preferred
Experience interviewing and helping hire strong engineers is preferred; experience building a small team is a plus
Experience with Kubernetes
Familiarity with NoSQL/vector/search stores is a plus

Responsibilities

Own projects end-to-end, from ideation to delivery
Design scalable backends, frontends, and AI-powered applications
Integrate and operationalize ML models into various aspects of our product stack
Drive infrastructure for Model training, deployment and monitoring
Collaborate directly with product, design, and data to move fast
Improve code quality, CI/CD, developer experience, and reliability
Build, support, unblock, and grow a small team of engineers
Nurture a high-performance and agile engineering culture