About the role
- Define and enforce engineering quality standards — code review practices, test coverage expectations, definition of done
- Own the bug triage process and personally track the health of the backlog
- Hold the bar on what "ready to ship" means — and push back when it isn't
- Treat production incidents as architectural signals, not operational noise
- Join strategic customer conversations where platform architecture or reliability is on the table
- Lead the response to critical customer escalations — understand the problem technically, communicate clearly, and follow through
- Review customer feedback loops and ensure they directly influence engineering priorities
- Participate in pre-sales discussions where technical depth matters
- Own the reliability commitments that go into customer contracts and build the engineering practice that backs them up
- Led an engineering team of 6–15 engineers in a high-growth product company — hired, developed, and made hard calls on performance
- Shipped complex software products on schedule with a high quality bar — repeatedly, not just once
- Managed engineers across multiple technical disciplines — backend, frontend, and ideally AI or data-heavy systems
- Owned platform reliability directly — defined SLOs, run incident responses, made prioritization decisions to protect stability
- Worked directly with product management on roadmap and sprint execution — not just attended meetings, but shaped outcomes
- Engaged with customers in a technical capacity — escalations, architectural discussions, trust-building conversations
- Managed in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and ambiguity is the norm
- Background as a software engineer yourself — you've written production code and know what hard looks like from the inside
- Experience managing teams building AI, agent, or ML systems
- Worked in developer tooling, QA infrastructure, or platform engineering
- Experience in a company that went through significant scaling
- Direct involvement in GTM motions — pre-sales, customer onboarding, enterprise escalation management
- Familiarity with CI/CD, test infrastructure, or software quality tooling
What We Offer
- Senior leadership compensation benchmarked to high-growth product companies
- Meaningful equity at a stage where it compounds
- Direct partnership with the founding team on engineering strategy and people decisions
- The opportunity to build and lead one of the most technically ambitious engineering teams in the QA space
- Real customer impact — the platform you maintain is what engineering teams at growing companies use to ship with confidence