Head of Engineering (AI)

Location: San Francisco, hybrid

Salary: $200,000–$300,000 per year plus equity

Company

LlamaIndex builds software that makes enterprise data useful for AI applications, with a focus on document understanding.

What you will do

• Lead and develop the engineering team, setting priorities, ownership, accountability, and technical direction.
• Partner with leadership and product teams to translate customer needs into a focused roadmap and predictable delivery.
• Stay hands-on with architecture, code reviews, production debugging, and implementation of critical changes.
• Guide application services, APIs, data pipelines, and ML infrastructure while balancing customer needs and long-term maintainability.
• Work with ML engineers and researchers on model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and production operations.
• Improve testing, observability, security, incident response, releases, hiring, and technical leadership development.

Requirements

• Experience leading engineering teams in B2B SaaS and operating customer-facing products.
• Experience leading multiple engineering teams or technical domains comparable in complexity to a 20–30-person organization.
• Strong current hands-on engineering skills, including production coding, architecture reviews, and complex debugging.
• Practical familiarity with model serving and model training, including fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and production operations.
• Strong background in backend systems, APIs, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Track record of hiring and developing engineers, setting expectations, communicating clearly, and applying sound product judgment.

Nice to have

• Experience scaling engineering at a Series A–C startup.
• Experience with document processing, OCR, extraction, retrieval, indexing, enterprise data, LLMs, or multimodal models.
• Experience with GPU infrastructure, distributed training, inference optimization, or model serving frameworks.
• Experience building developer tools or API-first products and handling multi-tenancy, access controls, auditability, and security reviews.
• Experience developing engineering managers while remaining closely involved in technical execution.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement in San Francisco.
• Direct communication, customer focus, and responsibility for results.
• Equity included in the compensation package.