Head of Engineering

### About the Role We're building an AI-native platform for the insurance industry — a $7T market still largely powered by manual workflows and legacy software. Our product is live, trusted by a rapidly growing customer base, and now entering its next phase of scale. We're looking for a **Head of Engineering** to own the engineering function end-to-end: execution, architecture, quality, and the team. This is a **builder-leader role** — you'll report directly to the technical founder (CTO/CPO) and serve as the person who turns product direction into shipped, reliable software. The founder is moving increasingly toward customers, product strategy, and the hardest technical problems; you own everything in between. There's a clear path to VP Engineering as the team grows. You're not starting from scratch. You inherit a working product, paying customers, a real data asset, and a team to grow. What's yours to build is the engineering *organisation*: team structure, pod model, tech-lead layer, engineering culture, and the processes that let us ship fast without breaking things. ### What You'll Do - **Own engineering output.** Drive architecture, technical decisions, and day-to-day shipping. Hands-on enough to design hard systems and review critical code — not a purely hands-off manager. - **Build and lead the team.** Hire, manage, and coach engineers. Organize the org into focused pods (e.g., Voice/AI, Campaigns & Integrations, Platform/Reliability) with strong tech leads. - **Make reliability boring.** Own the release gate, on-call rotation, and incident response. Drive the team from firefighting mode to a stable, predictable operational baseline — this is the #1 success metric for the role. - **Ship the core platform.** Lead engineering on a real-time voice platform, an agent/skills layer, omnichannel messaging (voice, email, SMS), and deep integrations with insurance-industry systems (AMS, CRMs, carrier portals). - **Run an AI-native engineering org.** You and your team use AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) as a daily force-multiplier — orchestrating agents rather than hand-typing everything — and raise the team's leverage without sacrificing quality. - **Collaborate with leadership.** Partner closely with the CTO/CPO, product, design, and customer success to translate strategy into prioritised, shipped features. - **Set the quality bar.** Define engineering standards, testing practices, and the cultural expectation that speed and quality are not trade-offs. ### What We're Looking For **Required** - Proven experience leading an engineering team to ship end-to-end products in a fast-moving startup environment, including direct hiring and people development - Strong ownership of system architecture and production-quality software — you set the technical direction, standards, and quality bar - Hands-on experience building and shipping **real-time voice platforms**, omnichannel messaging systems, and deep integrations with external APIs or industry-specific systems - Ability to operate effectively in a **fully remote, globally distributed team** with asynchronous communication across multiple time zones - Proven track record collaborating with executive stakeholders (CTO, CPO, product, design, CS) to translate strategy into concrete engineering deliverables **Nice to Have** - Background in AI/ML product engineering or experience deploying LLM-based features in production - Familiarity with the insurtech or broader fintech landscape - Experience at a high-growth B2B SaaS company (e.g., sales engagement, conversational AI, CRM, or revenue intelligence tools) - Prior experience building and scaling an engineering org from ~5 to 20+ engineers ### Compensation & Benefits - **Salary:** $120,000 – $144,000 USD annually - Early-stage equity participation - Fully remote work environment - **Visa sponsorship:** Not available — candidates must be authorised to work in the US ### Location This role is **fully remote**. The company is he…