TLDR Own technical direction and grow the engineering org at a fast-scaling applied AI company, building the platform that runs autonomous agents inside the world's largest enterprises. Clear path to CTO if it's a good fit.
About Varick
Varick builds AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside the world's largest enterprises. Our forward-deployed engineers and strategists embed with client teams, map how work actually runs, then our engineers build the agents into production. We're venture-backed, revenue-generating from day one, and already in production inside several of these companies. Every deployment compounds the platform, our Varick OS, which is where all agents are spun up, monitored, optimized, and deployed. You'll be joining an elite team from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, BCG, Stanford, and more.
The Role
As Head of Engineering, you'll be the senior-most engineer at Varick. You lead a core platform team and the teams that deliver client implementations, partner with product owners to run several engagements at once, and own the technical direction that decides whether this becomes a generational platform or stays a services business. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure management seat: most of your time goes to senior IC work (architecture, requirements, the hard technical calls, building alongside the team), and as implementations grow it shifts toward technical oversight across engagements while staying deeply technical throughout.
What You'll Do
- Set technical direction. Own architecture across the platform and every client implementation, including build-vs-buy calls and the design decisions that shape how we scale from one client to many.
- Lead and grow the team. You own the seam between a core platform team and multiple client-implementation teams: the platform serving the implementations, the implementations sharpening the platform. Mentor the current engineers, hire the next wave, and set the standards that keep quality high as the team grows.
- Ship production AI agents. Guide the teams building compound agent systems (multi-step orchestration, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation suites, confidence-gated human-in-the-loop) that run reliably inside enterprise ERP and CRM software, where a single step can touch a client's general ledger.
- Run the multi-client fleet. Own the machinery that runs many clients on different versions across our cloud, dedicated instances, a client's VPC, or on-prem: per-client config and isolation, and fleet-wide upgrade and rollback.
- Own the infrastructure. Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Set a deployment topology a small team can operate safely.
- Set the pace. We ship to production in days, not quarters. Drive velocity, cut scope where it doesn't matter, and keep the team focused on what does.
What We're Looking For
- 6+ years of software engineering, including real time leading engineers as a tech lead, manager, or founding engineer accountable for a team's output
- A track record of building and shipping substantial systems quickly, ideally in a startup or fast-moving frontier environment
- Hands-on experience building AI agents or LLM systems in production (orchestration, tool use, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, human-in-the-loop), with a solid grasp of inference economics and model behavior
- Evaluation and reliability discipline: eval suites, confidence thresholds, and fail-closed behavior when the model is uncertain
- Strong distributed-systems instincts, comfort owning infrastructure (Kubernetes, IaC, cloud), and experience operating software across many deployments and versions (release management, staged rollout, rollback)
- Comfort with fast, low-process development, paired with the judgment to know when more rigor is warranted
- Ownership and high agency: you take responsibility for the outcome, not just your code, and you don't wait for permission
- Strong, proactive communication with engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike
Nice to Have
- Former CTO, Head of Engineering, or Eng/Tech Lead at a high-growth startup or frontier tech company
- Durable execution or workflow orchestration experience (Temporal or similar)
- Enterprise environments with real security and reliability requirements (SOC 2, audit)
- Depth in multi-tenant backend systems, data modeling, and enterprise integration (OAuth, connectors, ERP and CRM)
- Forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering, or a background in process mining / workflow automation
What We Offer
- Meaningful equity (1-3%) with founding-team scope
- Real ownership: the technical decisions still open are yours to make, and the system you build is the product we sell
- Direct access to decision-makers at the world's largest enterprises, not requirements relayed through six layers
- An engineering org that's yours to shape from the ground up
- Flexible PTO, free lunch and dinner in the office, Ubers home if you're staying late, monthly team dinners and activities, and more
Logistics
On-site in our San Francisco Financial District office, 5-6 days a week. Comfortable with startup hours, for startup upside.