Head of Engineering, AI Platform
About The Position
AiDASH is hiring a Head of Engineering to build and lead a new Data Inference AI Pipeline team supporting the growth of its satellite- and AI-powered utility products. This newly created leadership role will shape the team’s charter, architecture, culture, hiring bar, and engineering practices, while owning the pipeline that powers AI products as the customer base expands. The role offers ownership of technical decisions, team design, and engineering practices, and reports to the VP of Engineering. The Head of Engineering will architect a multimodal data inference pipeline that scales efficiently, develop model-training and human-in-the-loop feedback loops, establish engineering practices, and hire, coach, and develop managers and leads. The role partners with Product, Data Science, and Design on roadmap decisions and works with the VP of Engineering on cross-organizational architecture. The position is based in Palo Alto, California, with a hybrid schedule requiring two days per week in the office. Success in the first six months includes staffing the team’s first core hires, operating an architecture that scales data volume without a proportional increase in infrastructure cost, establishing clear ownership and delivery practices, and providing leadership with a reliable view of progress, risks, and resourcing needs.
Requirements
- 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, including 3–5+ years leading engineering teams, such as managing managers or senior individual contributors.
- A track record of building a team or system from scratch, rather than only scaling an existing one.
- Hands-on experience architecting data or machine-learning pipelines at scale, with a strong grasp of throughput, latency, and cost-efficiency trade-offs for inference workloads.
- Experience building modern AI systems—including reasoning frameworks, agentic capabilities, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), self-correction loops, and memory and state management—that shipped to production for real customers.
- Strong background in cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS architectures, including AWS, Kubernetes, and microservices.
- Proven ability to improve delivery predictability and accelerate onboarding and go-live for enterprise customers.
- Confidence owning technical decisions within a defined scope while partnering with a VP on strategy and resourcing.
- Experience managing global, distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones.
- High-ownership mindset, low ego, collaborative spirit, and passion for building teams that do their best work.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with geospatial data, satellite imagery, or remote-sensing pipelines.
- Background in utilities, energy, or infrastructure.
- Experience hiring and scaling a new engineering team in a high-growth Series B/C startup environment.
- Open-source contributions, technical certifications, or published engineering writing.
Responsibilities
- Define the Data Inference AI Pipeline team’s charter, headcount plan, and hiring bar, and make the first several hires.
- Architect a multimodal data inference pipeline that scales with customer growth while keeping compute and infrastructure cost per inference efficient.
- Build model-training and human-in-the-loop feedback loops that keep AI accurate and continuously improving.
- Establish engineering practices, including code review, testing, on-call, and release processes.
- Hire, coach, and develop engineering managers and leads, and manage performance as needed.
- Build a high-performing, high-ownership team culture.
- Partner with Product, Data Science, and Design to shape roadmap trade-offs and sequencing.
- Own technical decisions within the team’s scope and partner with the VP of Engineering on cross-organizational architecture decisions.
- Provide leadership with a clear, reliable view of progress, risks, and resourcing needs.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage: 100% coverage for employees and 80% for spouses and children.
- Health Reimbursement Account (HRA), 100% funded by AiDASH, to cover medical deductibles.
- 401(k) plan; employees may begin contributing after two months of employment, with no company match currently offered.
- Parental leave: 16 weeks for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary caregivers.
- Vacation accrual of 20 days per year, plus one flex holiday.
- Winter break from December 25 through January 1.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
