Head of Engineering

Doppler

1d•Remote

About The Position

2026 has been a breakout year for Doppler, helping over 78,000 startups and enterprises manage secrets at scale, and landing their first million-dollar customer. Doppler's mission is to make it easy and secure for software developers of every experience level and teams of any size to manage their app configuration and secrets. They aim to solve the problem of manual .env file management or overly complex secrets managers, especially with the rise of AI tooling expanding access to secrets. Doppler is a developer-first secrets management platform that enables engineers and security teams to securely store secrets across any cloud infrastructure or deployment environment at scale. The team is entrepreneurial, values self-awareness and meaningful impact, and is open to unconventional approaches. They default to zero meetings, document everything, and encourage 10% compounding time. The Head of Engineering role reports directly to the CEO, Amber Britton, and is a technical leadership position first, involving architecture decisions, code reviews, and on-call conversations. The role is also a member of Doppler's leadership team, participating in company-wide decisions. In the near term, the focus will be on accelerating product velocity, expanding Doppler's product surface area, and iterating on their on-prem offering for enterprise. Longer term, the role will involve growing and shaping the engineering organization.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading engineering teams at startup scale
Hands-on coding proficiency: you can read a PR, spot an architectural issue, and have a technical opinion on day one
A track record of shipping security-sensitive infrastructure products. You understand what it means to build systems people trust with credentials, keys, and secrets
Demonstrated ability to improve velocity at a growing company where you've made teams faster
Professional experience with AI-assisted development tools, not just personal use
The instincts of a player-coach: you know when to lead from the front, when to delegate, and when to get out of the way
Strong communication skills with the CEO and non-technical stakeholders showing you can translate technical strategy into business terms
Comfort with ambiguity and resource constraints: you've built things without a full team, a full roadmap, or a full playbook

Nice To Haves

Knowledge and passion for security-first engineering.
Experience with distributed systems.
Prior experience operating at the exec or leadership team level.
On-prem or self-hosted product experience.
Strong DevOps/backend experience.
Developer tools or infrastructure company background.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve Doppler's technical direction: architecture, system design, security, infrastructure, and the tradeoffs that shape how we build
Own the engineering roadmap in close partnership with the CEO and product, translating company priorities into what gets built and in what order
Stay hands-on: you can review code on day one and do so regularly; the team shouldn't wonder whether you understand what they're building
Lead architectural decisions on our overall product, including on-prem and cloud-based offerings, deployment models, upgrade paths, and the tradeoffs of running Doppler inside a customer's infrastructure
Make the team faster by removing friction, improving tooling, and creating the conditions for focused, high-output work
Lead the strategy and adoption of AI development
Keep execution sharp across sprints and longer-horizon initiatives: clear priorities, unblocked engineers, and consistent delivery
Grow and hire exceptional engineers who raise the bar. You know what great looks like and you're honest about gaps
Build a remote engineering culture that's high-trust, high-ownership, and low-ego: people should do some of their best work here
Establish engineering standards for code quality, incident response, on-call, and system design that are rigorous without being bureaucratic
Work closely with sales and customer success on enterprise technical requirements
Partner with stakeholders on security posture. You understand that at Doppler, the security of our systems is inseparable from the product promise we make to customers
Contributing to company strategy alongside the CEO, representing the engineering perspective in business decisions, and helping shape how Doppler thinks about product direction and market positioning at the leadership level