Founding Head of Engineering Onsite (San Francisco, CA)

Dover; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Nth AI, builders of Nexus, is seeking a founding Head of Engineering to own the engineering execution behind our AI-native platform. You will work directly with the founders to shape architecture, build the team, and turn an emerging product into reliable enterprise software.

This hands-on leadership role requires shipping capabilities across backend, data workflows, and user interfaces, with a focus on architecture, reliability, and strong technical judgment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams while remaining technically hands-on.
• Track record shipping production B2B software for enterprise adoption.
• Strong backend and distributed-systems judgment, including APIs, asynchronous jobs, state management, integrations, and failure recovery.
• Meaningful experience with data platforms or production AI systems, with the ability to lead across both.
• Experience hiring strong engineers, clarifying ownership, and improving delivery without introducing unnecessary process.
• The ability to make sound tradeoffs under ambiguity and communicate them clearly to technical and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Translate product priorities into clear technical plans and ship complete capabilities across Nexus’s backend, orchestration, data workflows, and user experience.
• Establish clear service boundaries, durable workflow execution, useful observability, and maintainable interfaces across the platform.
• Build practices for evaluating agent behavior, validating generated assets, handling failures, and preserving human review where it matters.
• Recruit and develop exceptional software, data, and AI engineers. Set clear ownership and a high bar for technical judgment.
• Establish practical planning, code review, testing, release, and incident practices that support fast, dependable shipping.
• Partner with Product and the FDE team to turn deployment learning into reusable capabilities and prioritize the engineering work that unblocks customers.

Skills

Hands-on leadership

B2B software

Backend systems

Data platforms

Hiring engineers

Ambiguity decisions

Job description

Build the next generation of enterprise AI software.

Nth AI is building Nexus, an AI-native platform that creates the enterprise context layer for AI. Built inside Microsoft Azure and Fabric, Nexus automates the data integration, semantic modeling, and governance work required to bring enterprise AI into production.

We’re hiring a Founding Head of Engineering to own the engineering execution behind that vision. You’ll work directly with the founders to shape the architecture, build the team, and turn an emerging product into reliable enterprise software.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll make architecture decisions, review and write code, resolve difficult technical problems, and establish how the engineering organization delivers.

What you’ll own

• Core product engineering. Translate product priorities into clear technical plans and ship complete capabilities across Nexus’s backend, orchestration, data workflows, and user experience.

• Architecture and reliability. Establish clear service boundaries, durable workflow execution, useful observability, and maintainable interfaces across the platform.

• AI engineering discipline. Build practices for evaluating agent behavior, validating generated assets, handling failures, and preserving human review where it matters.

• Team building. Recruit and develop exceptional software, data, and AI engineers. Set clear ownership and a high bar for technical judgment.

• Engineering execution. Establish practical planning, code review, testing, release, and incident practices that support fast, dependable shipping.

• Enterprise feedback into product. Partner with Product and the FDE team to turn deployment learning into reusable capabilities and prioritize the engineering work that unblocks customers.

What you bring

• Experience leading engineering teams while remaining technically hands-on.

• A track record of shipping production B2B software and taking early products through enterprise adoption.

• Strong backend and distributed-systems judgment, including APIs, asynchronous jobs, state management, integrations, and failure recovery.

• Meaningful experience with data platforms or production AI systems, with the ability to lead across both.

• Experience hiring strong engineers, clarifying ownership, and improving delivery without introducing unnecessary process.

• The ability to make sound tradeoffs under ambiguity and communicate them clearly to technical and business stakeholders.

Especially relevant

Microsoft Azure, Fabric, Azure AI Foundry, agent orchestration, semantic systems, and software deployed inside customer-controlled environments.

Early impact

Establish a clear architecture and execution plan, strengthen the release process, and help the team deliver a complete, validated enterprise workflow through Nexus. Shape the next engineering hires around the product’s most important needs.