Head of Engineering at UP.Labs – Los Angeles, California

Job Description:We’re partnering with one of the world’s leading freight and logistics companies 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.
• 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
• Domain expertise in trucking, freight, logistics

Below are the common technologies we use. However, this list is neither exhaustive or immutable:

• Frameworks & Libraries: React/Tailwind, Fastify/Next.js, LangChain/LangGraph
• Languages: TypeScript, Python
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes/Helm, Terraform, GitHub Actions, GitOps, AWS/GCP/Azur

Location: Santa Monica, CAHybrid Work Environment: In-office from Monday-Thursday; remote on FridaysTravel: 6+ weeks per year