What are the responsibilities and job description for the Head of Engineering position at Pika?
About the Company
Pika is a dynamic and innovative company focused on building cutting-edge technology solutions. Our mission is to empower engineers and create a culture of excellence, collaboration, and growth.
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.
Responsibilities
- 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
Qualifications
- 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
Required Skills
- 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
Pay range and compensation package
Competitive salary based on experience and qualifications.
Application Link
https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pika/d92d73fd-7f8e-42cc-8e4f-96fdead87a02