Head of Software Engineering

Head of Software Engineering

New York, NY (on-site, 5 days)

$250k to $350k base + equity

I'm working with a well backed robotics and AI startup building autonomous robots that work in the real world.

The team is small, growing fast, and about to double. This is a foundational leadership hire, reporting directly to the founders.

They need a Head of Software Engineering to build and lead the software team through rapid growth, while still shipping code every week. Not a role for someone who wants to delegate the hard problems. It's for someone who wants to be in the middle of them.

What you'll do

• Hire, grow and retain a high calibre software engineering team
• Set the rhythms that make the team fast: planning, standups, retros and code review culture
• Review code daily and ship 1 to 3 PRs a week
• Drive architecture decisions and debug production issues alongside the team
• Own the long term software roadmap with the co-founder and product
• Lead near term customer deployments with real architectural challenges
• Be the technical voice in leadership, working across hardware, research and product

What they're looking for

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years leading engineering teams
• Still deeply hands on: you write and review code every week
• Strong distributed systems design and the ability to explain tradeoffs clearly
• Experience growing and stabilising teams in fast moving environments
• Fluent in Go and/or Python
• Has built processes that make teams faster, without the bureaucracy

Nice to have

• Hybrid cloud and on prem, or customer site delivery combining hardware and software
• Robotics, automation or similar hardware heavy background
• Agentic systems, LLM workflows or AI infrastructure
• Kubernetes, AWS and infrastructure as code

Package: $250k to $350k base, equity, fully covered healthcare, unlimited PTO. On-site in NYC 5 days a week.