Head of Engineering

Title: Head of Engineering

Reporting to: Ishaan (CEO & Co-Founder)

Business Need for the Hire:

• Build and scale the engineering organization as the company enters its next stage of growth.
• Own engineering execution, hiring, and day-to-day engineering operations.
• Lead hiring efforts with a goal of adding approximately 8 engineers by the end of the year.
• Allow the founders to spend more time on product and company strategy while establishing scalable engineering processes.

Wider Team and Where This Role Sits:

• Reports directly to Ishaan and works closely with the founders.
• Responsible for leading and growing the engineering organization.
• Oversees engineering hiring, technical execution, delivery, and engineering management across the business.

Essential Skills Required to Interview a Candidate:

• Previous experience as a Head of Engineering, Director of Engineering, or Engineering Manager at a high-growth startup.
• Strong technical background with Rust or Python experience and the ability to lead highly technical Rust engineering teams.
• Experience building and scaling engineering organizations within startup environments (Seed-Series C preferred).
• Proven track record hiring and developing engineering teams.
• Strong technical leadership across distributed systems, infrastructure, APIs, or developer tooling.
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, ambiguous startup environments.
• Experience improving engineering processes while maintaining execution speed.
• Onsite in San Francisco.

Questions to Screen Candidates:

• Tell me about the largest engineering organization you've built or managed.
• How have you scaled engineering processes without slowing product velocity?
• How do you balance hiring, execution, and technical quality?
• Tell me about a difficult engineering leadership decision you had to make.
• Why does a company at LiteLLM's stage interest you?

Interview Process:

Introductory conversation with Ishaan.

To be determined.

Selling Points of the Role/Company:

• Gateway supporting 100 LLMs through a single API.
• Trusted by enterprise customers including NASA, Adobe, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Netflix.
• Approximately $14M ARR and adding roughly $1M ARR month over month.
• Y Combinator company that has remained fully profitable after only raising a Seed round.
• Opportunity to build and scale the engineering organization during a period of hypergrowth.
• Work directly alongside the founders with significant ownership and influence.
• Small, scrappy engineering culture with meaningful technical challenges across AI infrastructure and developer tooling.

Location:

• San Francisco, CA
• 5 days/week onsite

Salary:

• TBD (Highly competitive base meaningful equity)

Benefits:

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental & Vision
• 401(k)
• Equity package

Bonus:

• Performance bonus (if applicable)

Visa Sponsorship/Relocation:

• Relocation assistance available for exceptional candidates.
• Visa sponsorship TBD.

Ideal Start Date:

• ASAP

CV Feedback & Interview Feedback Agreed SLAs:

• TBD

Additional Notes:

• Strong preference for candidates who have built engineering teams at startup companies (ideally Seed-Series C).
• Open to former founders, Directors of Engineering, or experienced engineering leaders ready to own an entire engineering organization.
• Candidates should be comfortable remaining hands-on while also building processes, mentoring engineers, and driving hiring.

Salary : $300