Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering
Department: Engineering | Location: Palo Alto HQ | Type: Full-time, On-site
About the Role
We're looking for a Head of Engineering to build, lead, and scale Pika's engineering organization. You'll own the entire engineering function — from technical strategy and architecture to hiring, team structure, and delivery execution. This is a role for someone who can operate at both the 30,000-foot level (org design, roadmap, technical vision) and the ground level (debugging a production issue, reviewing a critical PR).
Our current team is young, talented, and growing fast. We need a leader who can set the standard, build the culture, and create an environment where engineers grow quickly and ship great work.
What You'll Do
• Own the engineering organization — team structure, hiring plan, career ladders, and engineering culture
• Set technical strategy — define architecture principles, technology choices, and technical roadmap aligned with product goals
• Build the team — recruit senior engineers and leads, establish interview processes, and create an environment that attracts top talent
• Drive execution — ensure the team consistently delivers high-quality software on time; remove blockers, manage dependencies, and maintain velocity
• Establish engineering excellence — code quality standards, testing practices, incident response, on-call rotations, and operational maturity
• Scale systems — oversee the evolution from early-stage infrastructure to production-grade systems capable of supporting millions of users
• Manage technical debt — make strategic decisions about when to invest in long-term architecture vs. ship fast
• Collaborate with leadership — work with founders, product, design, and research to align engineering execution with company strategy
• Stay technical — you don't need to write code daily, but you understand the codebase, review architecture decisions, and can go deep when needed
What We're Looking For
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in engineering management (managing managers preferred)
• Experience building engineering teams from scratch or scaling from small (5-10) to medium (30-50+)
• Strong technical background — distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), API platforms, real-time systems
• Proven track record of delivery — you've shipped products used by millions of users
• Hiring expertise — you know how to source, evaluate, and close senior engineering talent
• Culture builder — you've created engineering environments where people do their best work
• Strategic thinker — you can translate business goals into technical roadmaps and organizational structure
• Comfortable with ambiguity — early-stage means priorities shift; you're energized by that, not frustrated
• Strong communicator — you represent engineering to the company and the company to engineering
Nice to Have
• Experience with AI/ML products, LLM-based systems, or agent platforms
• Experience at a high-growth startup (Series A through Series C)
• Background in platform engineering, developer tools, or consumer products
• Experience managing remote or distributed teams
• Prior CTO or VP Engineering role at a startup
• Familiarity with our stack: TypeScript/Node.js, Python, AWS EKS, Kubernetes