Head of Engineering

ABOUT THE ROLE:

The Head of Engineering runs Varick's engineering. You lead a core platform team and the teams that deliver client implementations, partner with product owners to run multiple engagements at once, and own the technical direction that determines whether this company becomes a generational platform or stays a services business. You set the bar, grow the team, and are accountable for what we ship across every client.

We build bespoke AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside Fortune 5000 companies, and we deploy the whole platform plus the implementation into the client's environment - our multi-tenant cloud, a dedicated instance, their VPC, on-prem, or fully air- gapped. Every client deployment compounds the product. The architecture is sharp and already deeply thought through; your job is to turn it into a running, reliable fleet through the teams you lead - staying technical enough to make the hard calls and jump in where it counts, as we scale from 1:1 to 1:many. This role has a direct path to CTO..

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Lead the Engineering Teams. You lead a core platform team and multiple client implementation teams, and you own the seam between them - the platform serving the implementations, the implementations sharpening the platform. You partner with product owners to run several engagements at once, decide what the platform builds next versus what a client needs now, and are accountable for the technical and quality bar across every implementation.

• Build and Grow the Org Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers and future leads across both the platform team and the implementation teams. Set code review and reliability standards, establish the engineering processes that hold under pressure, and build an org that scales from 5 to 50. You hire people who are better than you at specific things and give them room to operate.

• Own the Technical Direction. Set the architecture and the technical bar across the platform and every implementation, make the build-vs-buy calls and the decisions the design left open, and stay hands-on where it counts. Track what's actually useful - agent frameworks, tool use, long-context reasoning, evaluation methods - and translate it into production. You know the difference between a research demo and something that moves a client's money at 2am inside a regulated environment.

• Ship Production AI Agents at Scale. Guide the teams building compound agent systems - multi-step orchestration, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation suites, confidence-gated human-in-the-loop — that run reliably inside enterprise ERP and CRM software. These systems handle real operational workflows, real money, and real consequences. Demoware doesn't survive here; governed, evaluated, fail-closed systems do - and you take on the hardest builds yourself.

• Own the Multi-Client Fleet. Own the machinery that runs many clients on different versions across shared-cloud, dedicated, VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped deployments - per-client config and isolation, fleet-wide upgrade and rollback, and the monitoring, alerting, and on-call that back our 24/7 support commitment. Varick knows before the client notices.

• Own the Infrastructure. Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, and Azure, including an in-flight cloud migration. You set the deployment topology and make it something a small team can operate safely.

• Set the Pace. We ship to production in days, not quarters. You drive engineering velocity across the teams, cut scope ruthlessly, and keep everyone focused on what matters. Analysis paralysis kills startups - you don't let it happen

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

• 6+ years of software engineering, including real time leading engineers — as a lead, manager, or founding engineer accountable for a team's output

• Proven engineering leadership — you've built, grown, and mentored engineering teams, owned delivery across multiple teams or workstreams at once, and people want to work for you

• Comfortable partnering with product owners and running several client engagements in parallel — you hold the quality and delivery bar across teams without doing all the work yourself

• Deep experience building and shipping AI agents in production — not just prompt demos,

but the full stack: orchestration, tool use, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop

• Evaluation and reliability discipline — eval suites, confidence thresholds, and fail-closed behavior when the model is uncertain

• Strong distributed-systems instincts — you can architect for reliability, scale, and iteration speed simultaneously; durable execution / workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) is a major plus

• Depth in multi-tenant backend systems, data modeling, and enterprise integration — real APIs, OAuth, connectors, and enterprise ERP and CRM software

• Comfortable owning infrastructure — Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud (AWS /

GCP / Azure)

• Experience operating software across many deployments and versions — release management, staged rollout, rollback, and keeping different customers on different versions without drift

• Track record on the operational side at scale — monitoring and alerting, on-call and incident response, and the reliability practices that let a small team run production for enterprise clients 24/7

• Ownership mentality — you take responsibility for the outcome, not just your code

• High agency — you don't wait for requirements documents or permission

HELPFUL EXPERIENCE:

• Forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering — talking directly to the people whose process you're automating

• Background in process mining, workflow automation, or enterprise process discovery

• Infrastructure depth (Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud architecture)

• Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup

• Experience operating in enterprise environments with real security, compliance, and reliability requirements (SOC 2, audit, on-call / incident response)

• Published research or significant open-source contributions in agents / applied AI

WHY VARICK:

• Build the platform, not a feature. You own the entire technical vision. This is founding-team scope, not a staff IC seat inside a 200-person eng org.

• Production, not papers. Every system you build runs inside real enterprise operations. 100% deployment rate. Your work has immediate, measurable impact.

• Early enough to be a co-builder. Your technical decisions shape the company. The architecture you build is the product we sell.

• Compounding leverage. Every client deployment feeds the pattern library and makes the platform smarter. You're building a system that gets better with every customer, not doing the same integration twice.

• Work with decision-makers. You talk directly to CFOs, COOs, and ops leads at Fortune 5000 companies — not product managers relaying requirements through six layers.

*We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. Employment is subject to a standard confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement.