Head of Engineering

Posted 23 Days Ago
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San Francisco, CA, USA
In-Office
Expert/Leader
Artificial Intelligence • Security • Software • Cybersecurity
The Role
Leads Pi Security’s engineering organization and technical execution at an early-stage security startup. Responsibilities include owning the engineering roadmap, making architectural decisions, writing and reviewing code, hiring and mentoring engineers, establishing scalable engineering practices, and guiding backend, AI/ML, integrations, and security-focused platform development. The role partners with founders and customers and is fully onsite in San Francisco.
Summary Generated by Built In
Head of Engineering

Pi.Security · San Francisco, CA · Full-time · Onsite, 5 days a week

About Pi.Security

Pi is building an agentic product security platform for teams that need to secure software at the speed they build it.

Modern development is accelerating, but security knowledge is still scattered across code, tickets, documents, incidents, reviews, and the people who remember why decisions were made. Pi turns that context into institutional security memory, helping teams triage faster, remediate in context, prevent repeat vulnerability classes, and embed security guardrails where engineering work already happens. We are building for a future where security is not a blocker at the end of the development process. It is part of how software gets designed, reviewed, shipped, and improved.

Pi was recognized on Fast Company's 2026 Next Big Things in Tech list and covered by Forbes!

About the Role

We're hiring our first Head of Engineering to help lead the technical build-out of Pi's platform at a pivotal, early stage. You'll report directly to our CEO/co-founder and work shoulder-to-shoulder with a small, high-caliber team (fewer than 10 engineers today) as we scale the org. This is a hands-on leadership role: part of the week you'll be writing and reviewing code and making architectural calls, and part of the week you'll be hiring, mentoring, and shaping how the engineering team works as it grows.

This role is based in our San Francisco office, five days a week. We build in person, alongside the founding team, and that is a deliberate choice.

What You'll Do
  • Own execution of the engineering roadmap end to end, working closely with the CEO/co-founder on product and technical strategy.

  • Stay hands-on — writing code, reviewing PRs, and making architecture and design decisions alongside the team, especially in the platform's core systems (codebase ingestion, root-cause analysis, remediation generation, and the Sloane assistant).

  • Recruit, hire, and onboard Pi's next engineers, and put in place the processes, standards, and culture that let a small team move fast without breaking things.

  • Set technical direction across the stack — backend services, AI/ML pipelines, integrations with customer developer workflows (source control, CI/CD, issue trackers) — balancing speed with the reliability and trust our security customers require.

  • Partner cross-functionally with founders on customer-facing technical conversations, including with security and engineering leaders at our customers.

  • Build engineering practices (testing, code review, on-call, incident response) that scale as the team and customer base grow, without over-engineering for a startup's current stage.

  • Champion security and quality in our own engineering practices — as a security company, how we build has to hold up to scrutiny.

What We're Looking For
  • Proven experience as a hands-on engineering leader (e.g., Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, or Staff/Principal Engineer moving into leadership) at an early- or growth-stage startup, ideally having helped scale a team from single digits.

  • Strong full-stack or backend engineering background, with the technical depth to be a real contributor, not just a manager — you should be comfortable in the codebase, not just in planning docs.

  • Experience building and shipping complex, data-intensive, or AI/ML-driven products, ideally involving large codebases, static/dynamic analysis, or developer tooling.

  • A track record of hiring and developing strong engineers, and of building engineering culture and process from a small base.

  • Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous startup environment, with the judgment to know when to move fast and when to slow down (especially given the security-critical nature of the product).

  • Excellent communication skills — you'll work closely with founders, customers, and a growing team, often translating between technical and business context.

  • Willingness and desire to work onsite in San Francisco full-time.

Nice to Have
  • Background in application security, product security, vulnerability management, or a related security domain.

  • Experience with developer-tooling integrations (GitHub/GitLab, CI/CD systems, IDE plugins) or with LLM/agentic systems in production.

  • Experience at a security-focused company or working closely with security teams as customers.

  • Prior experience as an early engineering hire or founding engineer.

Why Pi

Pi is backed by a $35 million Series A led by Third Point Ventures and Brightmind Partners, with support from CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz and Armis founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael. Leading AI companies and enterprise innovators already rely on Pi, including xAI, Notion, Navan, Lemonade, and Teramind, and it's available through AWS Marketplace and a strategic partnership with Bugcrowd.

Our founders have lived inside this problem. Guy Arazi was a security researcher at Microsoft, and Yoni Ramon led offensive security work at Tesla. You'll work closely with both.

We're early enough that every hire shapes the product, the team, and how we work. You'll build alongside a humble, passionate, ambitious, and genuinely fun team that cares deeply about what we're building and about our customers.

We hire for four things, and we work this way every day:

  • Speed. Velocity over polish. Something impactful this week beats a perfect plan for next quarter.

  • Depth. You go past the point of requirement. That is usually where the interesting part starts anyway.

  • Curiosity. The people who do best here ask the thing everyone assumed was already answered.

  • Ambition. We take on assumptions this industry accepts as given, and disprove them.

Compensation & Benefits

The base salary range for this role in San Francisco is $245,000 - $339,000 per year. This is our good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay at hire. Where an offer lands depends on experience, skills, and level. Base salary is one part of total compensation, which also includes equity.

  • Meaningful equity in Pi.Security

  • Medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family, starting the 1st of the month after you join.

  • Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) for health and dependent care

  • Commuter benefits

  • Unlimited PTO

  • 401(k)

  • Health and wellness stipend

  • Lunch allowance on in-office days

Equal Opportunity

Pi.Security is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

 
 

Skills Required

  • Proven experience as a hands-on engineering leader, such as Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, or Staff/Principal Engineer transitioning into leadership
  • Strong full-stack or backend engineering background with the ability to contribute directly in the codebase
  • Experience building and shipping complex, data-intensive, or AI/ML-driven products
  • Track record of hiring and developing engineers and building engineering culture and processes
  • Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, ambiguous startup environment
  • Excellent communication skills with founders, customers, and engineering teams
  • Willingness and desire to work onsite full-time in San Francisco
  • Experience scaling an engineering team from single digits
  • Experience with large codebases, static or dynamic analysis, or developer tooling
  • Background in application security, product security, or vulnerability management
  • Experience with GitHub or GitLab, CI/CD systems, IDE plugins, or LLM/agentic systems in production
  • Experience at a security-focused company or working with security teams as customers
  • Prior experience as an early engineering hire or founding engineer
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The Company
35 Employees
Year Founded: 2025

What We Do

Pi is an agentic product-security platform that helps organizations secure software without slowing development. It continuously ingests codebases, past incidents, penetration-test reports, and tickets to build a security history; traces vulnerabilities to architectural root causes; detects variants; delivers contextual fixes in developer workflows; and turns past learnings into prevention guardrails that block insecure patterns in IDEs and pull requests. Its assistant, Sloane, answers questions about codebases and security history.

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