This isn’t your typical Head of Engineering role. We’re looking for a seasoned veteran who leads from the front and thrives in high-velocity, high-ownership environments. Your mission: build the fastest engineering team on the planet.
WHO YOU ARE:
You’re a former founder / technical early-stage operator with proven leadership experience in fast-moving startups or scaleups. You’re comfortable making imperfect decisions quickly, you’ve built products under pressure, and you know that momentum beats perfection.
You might be:
- A seasoned engineer who has already stepped into an Eng Leader role at a venture-backed startup
- An ex-founder who knows how to ship when the runway is short and the stakes are high
- A pragmatic builder who values time-to-value over “the right way”
WHAT MAKES YOU PERFECT FOR THIS ROLE:
1. Engineering leadership: You’ve coached and unblocked engineers in high-velocity, high-pressure environments.
2. Deep technical expertise: You have strong architecture instincts and solid security knowledge, but you’ll cut through complexity to keep shipping.
3. Startup DNA: You’ve shipped product in 0→1 or hyper-growth contexts where speed and ownership were survival skills.
4. Velocity obsession: You believe iteration > perfection, and your instinct is always to get value in front of users as fast as possible.
5. AI-first: You’re bullish on AI, vibe-coding daily, and always looking for ways to push velocity through AI-assisted workflows.
6. DevX focus: You obsess over developer experience because you know great tooling = more speed.
7. Execution focus: Monitoring, observability, and performance aren’t “nice to haves” — they’re how you ship fast without breaking trust.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Set the bar for engineering velocity - coaching, mentoring, and unblocking the team every day working closely with our CTO and co-founder
- Make architectural and security calls fast, balancing speed with long-term resilience
- Build and own best-in-class developer experience — tooling and workflows that eliminate drag
- Monitor and protect reliability and SLAs, while still moving at startup speed
- Partner tightly with product and design to deliver rapid, end-to-end iterations
- Establish a culture where iteration is celebrated and perfectionism is challenged
HOW WE WORK AT LIGHTDASH
- We build in public. Open source means moving fast with shared context.
- We challenge problems, not people. No blame, just solutions.
- We’re highly collaborative. Independent, but we win as a team (and with our community).
- We bias hard toward impact. We’d rather ship the wrong thing quickly and learn, than waste weeks polishing what nobody needs.
OUR TECH STACK:
- Primary: TypeScript, React, Node, SQL
- Frameworks: Express, React-hooks, Redux, RTK, Mantine
- Infrastructure: Docker, GCP, Kubernetes, Tracing, Prometheus
While familiarity with our stack is helpful, we value your ability to learn and adapt over speci