Head of Engineering Roadmap & Execution

Unusual Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity upside

Direct access to founders

High ownership, low bureaucracy

Job summary

Unusual Ventures in San Francisco is seeking a Systems Engineer to coordinate engineering efforts. This role involves tracking engineering initiatives, prioritizing requests from various teams, and identifying bottlenecks to keep projects moving smoothly.

The successful candidate will have a solid understanding of codebases, strong communication skills, and the ability to work asynchronously. Join our high-output team during a critical growth phase and enjoy direct access to founders and meaningful equity upside.

Qualifications

• Ability to read pull requests and system diagrams.
• Strong written communication skills and async-first working style.
• Capability to prioritize tasks effectively.

Responsibilities

• Track engineering roadmap initiatives across all teams.
• Field requests and translate them into clear, sequenced tasks.
• Identify bottlenecks and resolve issues proactively.
• Coordinate cross-functionally and build trust among teams.
• Manage project and issue tracking tools as needed.
• Own public documentation content.
• Coordinate compliance programs.

Skills

Codebase familiarity

Written communication

System understanding

Prioritization

Job description

Rime is a foundation modeling company that builds voice AI for enterprises running customer experiences at scale. Our models are purpose-built for high-volume conversational deployments, engineered for the accuracy, performance, and deployment flexibility that production environments actually demand.

We started from a different premise than the rest of the field: build voice AI for human connection, not slop. Before we trained a single model, we built our own corpus: full-duplex, studio-quality conversational speech of normal people, recorded and annotated by linguists. It's why our models are unparalleled in naturalism, and it's why enterprises pick Rime when pilots need to make it to production.

Role Overview

Engineering is growing and the coordination work — priorities, timelines, IC alignment, external triage — needs an owner. This isn't a process-management role. It's a role for someone who thinks in systems, can read a codebase, and wants to be in the room (and the repo) where technical decisions get made. You'll work directly with engineering leads, founders, and the modeling team to keep Rime moving in the same direction at the same time.

What You'll Own

• Engineering roadmap: tracking initiatives across all teams, ensuring alignment between company objectives and engineering blueprints. Driving the company roadmap while giving engineers liberty to do what they excel at.
• Priority triage: fielding requests from customers, sales, marketing, and leadership, and translating them into clear, sequenced tasks so ICs stay focused with aggressive prioritization.
• Bottleneck identification: identifying execution blockages, inefficient information channels, unrealistic timelines; and if necessary, do some ad-hoc coding to glue things together.
• Cross-functional reconciliation: Be the cross-functional coordinator across engineering roles, build trust across the company by soliciting feedback and proposing concrete action plans.
• Tooling hygiene: using and managing project management and issue tracking tools as needed to facilitate work coordination.
• Public documentation: you will be owning docs.rime.ai .
• Compliance program: owning the compliance burndown in coordination with infrastructure and engineering.

What We're Looking For

• Comfort diving into codebases — you can read a PR, understand a system diagram, and ask the questions in the smart way. If necessary, you head in and hack something with the help of LLMs.
• Strong written communication and async-first working style.
• You know the difference between a roadmap and a time-scoped plan, and when each is appropriate.
• Trust engineers’ expertise in their areas, but still hold them accountable without becoming an obstacle.
• When something small is blocking progress and you can fix it yourself, you do.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity (and excitement!) with ML or voice AI systems.
• Experience owning compliance or security programs.
• Background in working in SaaS companies with a significant amount of customer-facing roles.

Why Join Rime

• You'll be the connective tissue of a high-output engineering team at a critical growth stage.
• Direct access to founders and engineering leads — no layers.
• The role expands as you prove what it can be.
• Meaningful equity upside.
• High ownership, high standards, low bureaucracy.
• SF / Bay Area.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.