Head of Engineering
LlamaIndex · San Francisco
About this role
**About the Role** LlamaIndex is hiring a **Head of Engineering** to lead and develop our engineering team as we build software that makes enterprise data useful for AI applications. This is a **hands-on** role where you’ll own engineering execution, technical direction, hiring, and team development—working closely with company leadership and product teams to decide **what we build, how we build it, and how we deliver reliably** to customers. **What You’ll Do** - Lead and develop the engineering team, setting clear priorities, ownership, and accountability. - Partner with leadership to translate customer needs into a focused roadmap and deliver software predictably. - Stay directly involved in architecture, code reviews, production debugging, and critical implementations. - Set technical direction across application services, APIs, data pipelines, and ML infrastructure—balancing immediate needs with long-term maintainability. - Partner with ML engineers and researchers on model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment to improve production outcomes. - Guide model serving decisions across latency, throughput, GPU utilization, capacity, reliability, and inference cost. - Improve engineering practices for testing, observability, security, incident response, and releases. - Hire strong engineers, coach technical leaders and managers, and build a culture of direct communication, customer focus, and responsibility for results. **Required Qualifications** - Experience leading engineering teams in **B2B SaaS**, delivering and operating customer-facing products. - Experience leading multiple engineering teams or technical domains with complexity comparable to a **20–30-person** organization. - Strong hands-on engineering skills: ability to read/write production code, review architecture, and diagnose complex technical problems. - Practical familiarity with **model serving and model training** (workflows from experimentation/evaluation through deployment and production operations). - Understanding of tradeoffs between model quality, latency, throughput, GPU resources, reliability, and cost. - Strong background in backend systems, APIs, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. - Track record of hiring and developing engineers, setting expectations, and providing constructive feedback. - Good product judgment (knowing when to move quickly vs. invest in correctness, reliability, and security). - Clear written and verbal communication with technical teams, customers, and leadership. **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience scaling engineering at a **Series A–C** startup. - Experience with document processing, OCR, extraction, retrieval, indexing, or similar enterprise data systems. - Experience with LLMs or multimodal models, evaluation datasets, and model quality monitoring. - Experience with GPU infrastructure, distributed training, inference optimization, or model serving frameworks. - Experience building developer tools or API-first products. - Experience with enterprise requirements such as multi-tenancy, access controls, auditability, and security reviews. - Experience developing engineering managers while staying closely involved in technical execution. **Notes** - Pursuant to the **San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance**, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered. - LlamaIndex does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, employees, or any other
Listing freshness
CronJobs last confirmed this listing 1h ago. If its source stops confirming the opening for seven days, this page is removed from active inventory.