Head of Engineering

UP.Labs.com

Office

Los Angeles, CA

Full Time

Job Description:We’re partnering with one of the world’s leading construction equipment manufacturers to reinvent how the industrial world builds, operates, and makes decisions. This is a rare chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder with a global market leader, tackling high-impact problems with technology and taking bold ideas from 0 to 1. As an Engineering Leader on this venture, you’ll have the mandate and autonomy to turn raw concepts into real businesses - scoping, building, and launching software that can transform an industry.
You'll serve as the technical architect and engineering leader for one of our venture labs. You will be responsible for the technical design and delivery of the products and businesses. This includes everything from helping to validate technical feasibility of early-stage business concepts, identifying technical disruption opportunities, creating the initial technical design & architecture, recruiting great engineering talent, and building Proof-of-Concept products. You’ll work closely with the product lead through sprints and our development phases of MVP build, as well as mentoring and managing your engineering leads. You will work closely with our corporate partners and your other Head of Engineering peers across each lab and report directly to our Head of Studio (CTO). You’ll have the support you need to unlock the potential of your team, and work with your partners to build amazing startup companies.
In this role you will:

Lead your venture engineering teams (2-4 teams of 5 engineers each) to address genuine, real-world business problems
Build, grow and operate successful startups, working alongside venture leadership, head of product, business/growth leader and corporate partners
Heavily use AI tools to accelerate speed and quality of software delivery
Contribute to building internal AI tools for acceleration and IP portfolio expansion
Ensure technical feasibility of all venture products
Identifying areas where frontier technology can be a differentiator or moat for our ventures
Create rapid proofs of concept, then scale into functional MVPs to turn concepts into tangible reality.
Build using software best practices in testability, maintainability, security, and scalability
Be a player/coach, leading and mentoring your engineering teams, and not hesitating to get into the weeds when needed, oftentimes architecting solutions or writing code
Cross-pollinate learnings, best practice and insights between multiple ventures and labs to drive continuous improvement of Engineering at UP.Labs.
Enjoy working in a diverse, fast-paced, collaborative, and transparent environment where all ideas and opinions are valued

You should have:

7+ years of experience in engineering leadership developing technical teams.
Experience and passion in building startup ventures
Strong interest in adoption of AI for 10x improvement of Engineering workflows
Familiarity and preference working in ambiguous, fast-paced environments such as startups and growth-phase tech companies. No red tape and results focused.
Expert in using Databricks.
Hands-on and end-to-end product build, development and delivery experience with a mix of customer interfaces (e.g web, mobile), languages and technologies
Experience working with or managing remote, distributed teams including full-time engineers and vendors/contractors
The ability to build scalable, high quality, distributed services
Experience working with agile, lean and Continuous Delivery approaches, such as scrum, Continuous Integration, TDD, Infrastructure as Code, etc
Experience building cloud native software architectures
Strong experience in collaborating with Product teams to find effective solutions
Experience designing and maintaining effective agile development processes, quality assurance standards, and reliable delivery.
Ability to effectively evaluate technical talent on each of your teams, and through technical interviews
Strong communication skills to explain technical vision and deeply technical concepts to a variety of multidisciplinary team members and stakeholders
An open, curious and humble mindset that builds on to our open, inclusive and collaborative environment

Additional desired competencies:

Experience working with Data Science and Machine Learning Engineers to build frontier technology solutions

Below are the common technologies we use. However, this list is neither exhaustive or immutable:Frameworks & Libraries: Django, React, Node.js, Next.js, Nest.jsLanguages: Python, JavaScript / TypescriptInfrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Terraform, AWS/GCP/Azure
UP.Labs Summary:We build high-growth technology startups that enable faster, cleaner, and safer movement of people and goods. Our vision is to transform the moving world by pairing leading corporations and entrepreneurs with a proven methodology for launching and scaling software and hardware companies.
Our platform is unique in three ways:

Risk: We reward our entire team and ecosystem of partners with meaningful equity
Technology: We build and launch scalable technology products that form the basis for each venture
Industry Focus: We stay focused on the underlying fabric of society mobility and transportation

We work with corporate investors over a multi-year period to launch a portfolio of mobility-focused ventures. Our team is dedicated to the first year of a new venture’s life cycle: from ideation to minimum viable product build (and beyond) to recruiting and hiring the full-time team who will scale the business. We rapidly ideate concepts from scratch and vet them for early indicators of product-market fit.
Location: Santa Monica, CAHybrid Work Environment: In-office from Monday-Thursday; remote on FridaysTravel: 6+ weeks per year