Head of Engineering (Equity-only role)

The decisions you make in the first few months will define how this product runs for years.\n\nThe founding team at Epic Slope Partners comes from a business and product background. They move fast, make decisions, and have a clear vision for where this product is going. You will be the sole technical voice from day one, with a genuine seat at the table and full ownership of how the product is built.\n\nWhy Join Now\nYou own every technical decision from the ground up\nThe product is real and moving.

This is not a whiteboard exercise or a pre-seed idea. We are going to the market.\nFounders who are deeply invested in the product and move fast. You will have direct access to decision-makers from day one, with no layers in between.\nMeaningful equity at the earliest possible stage, with the upside that comes from building something before it scales.\nHard, interesting problems across infrastructure, product, and team building, all at once.\n\nThe Opportunity\nThe founding team has taken the product from concept to an initial working version and proven the core idea.

They are now ready to bring in the right engineering leader to own the technical side entirely: harden the foundations, scale it responsibly, and build the engineering function around it. You will inherit working code and a clear direction. Your job is to take it from there.\n\nYou will own the full engineering surface: backend, infrastructure, deployment, and the hiring of the first engineers.

You will report directly to the founders and will be the single most important technical voice in every architectural and product decision.\n\nIf you are the kind of engineer who wants broad ownership, fast iteration cycles, and the satisfaction of building something that actually ships and grows, this is the role.\n\nWhat You Will Own\n\nArchitecture and Technical Direction\nOwn the overall system architecture and make the key build-vs-buy calls as the product scales.\nSet the technical roadmap in close partnership with the founders, balancing speed to market with long-term maintainability.\nIdentify and address reliability, performance, and scalability risks before they become incidents.\nEvaluate and evolve the technology stack as usage grows and requirements sharpen.\n\nPlatform Reliability and Scale\nDesign and implement the infrastructure needed to serve a growing user base reliably and cost-efficiently.\nDrive observability across the stack: structured logging, alerting, distributed tracing, and on-call runbooks.\nArchitect systems that handle spiky, variable workloads without dropped jobs or runaway costs.\nImplement cost monitoring so the business always has visibility into what each operation costs.\n\nBackend and Product Engineering\nLead backend development: API design, service architecture, data modelling, and integration with third-party systems.\nEvolve the data model to support new features, team workspaces, usage metering, and billing as the product matures.\nOwn the CI/CD strategy, environment parity across dev, staging and production, and secrets management.\nCodify infrastructure as code and establish deployment pipelines that give the team confidence to ship quickly.\n\nTeam and Culture\nHire and onboard the first engineer to form a 2-member engineering team in the future. Define what good looks like from the very first pull request.\nEstablish code review standards, engineering processes, and on-call practice from day one.\nPartner with the founders on technical roadmap prioritization and represent engineering with customers, investors, and future hires.\n\nWhat We Are Looking For\n\nNon-negotiable\nMinimum 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role.\nA track record of scaling a product from early stage to meaningful user volume. You have personally owned architecture that served tens of thousands of concurrent users.\nStrong backend engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, async processing, and database design at scale.\nDeep experience with cloud infrastructure on GCP, AWS, or Azure: containers, managed databases, object storage, and auto-scaling compute.\nExperience with distributed job queue systems and the failure modes that come with them.\nA builder's mindset: you are comfortable writing code, reviewing PRs, and being in the details alongside a small team.\nClear communicator who can explain architectural trade-offs to non-engineers and make pragmatic decisions under uncertainty.\n\nStrongly Preferred\nSomeone who can get their hands dirty and get things done.\nExperience hiring and growing a small engineering team, including defining role profiles and running interviews.\nFamiliarity with AI or ML API integration patterns: orchestration, fallback chains, cost management across providers.\nExposure to GPU compute, media processing, or other compute-intensive pipeline environments.\nExperience with modern frontend frameworks sufficient to review frontend PRs and make informed API design decisions.\n\nThe Kind of Person Who Thrives Here\nYou prefer a working prototype over a perfect spec, and you know when to switch between the two modes.\nYou get frustrated by flaky infrastructure and fix it systematically rather than patching around it.\nYou can explain a cost model or a latency budget to a founder in plain English.\nYou care about the user experience downstream of your infrastructure choices.

Reliability and performance are not abstract to you.\nYou are energized by ownership, not anxious about it.