Head of AI-Native Engineering

Tread

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 250,000 - 450,000

Full time

14 days+

Application generator

Get a reply from this employer — a resume and cover letter tailored to exactly what they’re hiring for.

Get past ATS filters

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k)

Unlimited PTO

Transportation stipend

Job summary

Tread, the AI-native operating system for construction materials logistics, seeks a hands-on engineering leader to define and operate the next generation of our platform. You will partner with the CEO to shape the engineering OS and lead a team under 10 engineers shipping at high velocity.

You will guide the AI-driven SDLC, with specs, architecture, code review, and quality gates to enable AI-generated code.

Qualifications

7-12 years building software with leadership in high-growth startups or founder experience.
Experience operating payments or financial systems at scale.
Fluent and opinionated about AI-native engineering and production workflows.
Experience in-person in SF office 3-5 days/week.

Responsibilities

Own engineering execution across product, platform, data, payments, AI infrastructure, internal tooling, and the AI-native SDLC.
Recruit top-tier talent and raise our bar for excellence while balancing speed and reliability.
Drive the AI-native SDLC forward with shared skills, agent reviews, devcontainers, CI, and cloud agent infra.
Design and improve evaluation systems for AI-generated software including gates, benchmarks, regression tests, rollout, and monitoring.
Set technical direction across Rails API, data, payments logic, and client integrations.
Make build-vs-buy and platform-investment decisions to balance speed with long-term leverage.
Own platform reliability, data integrity, payment accuracy, security, and incident response.
Partner with the CEO on the product roadmap including deeper AI agent integration and embedded fintech.