Head of Engineering, San Francisco, CA ($350,000 - $500,000)

Company Description Recruiting Bond International is a global leader in Recruitment Process Outsourcing, executive search, headhunting, talent mapping, and workforce consulting, helping organizations build transformative talent strategies. The company partners with high-growth startups, PE-backed ventures, and global enterprises—from seed-stage to post-IPO—to deliver fast, scalable, and future-ready hiring outcomes. Operating across 50+ industries and 140+ countries, Recruiting Bond focuses on precision matching of talent from individual contributors to C-suite leaders and emphasizes diversity-first hiring at scale. With deep domain coverage in areas such as Technology & SaaS, FinTech, Healthcare & BioTech, Web3, Gaming, Energy, Manufacturing, and more, Recruiting Bond serves as the intelligence layer behind critical hiring decisions. The organization is driven by a mission to build careers, companies, and futures by architecting talent infrastructures that enable businesses to win.

About this role: Head of Engineering (San Francisco, CA | $350,000 - $500,000)
Job Details

• Experience: 3 - 5 Years
• Salary: $350,000 - $500,000
• Equity: Competitive Equity
• Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT
• Employment Type: Full-Time position
• Work Type: In-person
  

What you’ll do

• Set a cohesive technical direction. Make the product’s architecture understandable and durable. Decide what belongs in the shared product, what should be customer-specific, and where the team should invest or simplify.
• Lead the engineering team. Hire excellent people, develop the engineers already here, set a high bar for technical judgment, and create the clarity needed for teams to ship well together.
• Build alongside the team. Write production code, tackle difficult technical problems directly, and stay close to the quality and behavior of what we ship. This is not a management-only role.
• Be the face of engineering for customers. Join important technical conversations, understand what customers need, explain our decisions clearly, and take ownership when difficult engineering issues need resolution.
• Turn direction into delivery. Make trade-offs across reliability, product quality, speed, and customer needs—and ensure architectural decisions show up in a better product, not just in documents.
• Set the product and research direction. Identify which technical bets will make meaningfully better for customers, turn promising research into product priorities, and know when to stop exploring and ship.
  

What we’re looking for

• You’ve played a pivotal role at a startup or scale-up building and shipping AI agents. You can point to what you personally built, the decisions you made, and how the product changed as a result.
• You’ve worked through the hard parts of making agents useful in production: reliability, evaluation, tool use, context, and what happens when an agent gets something wrong.
• You’ve shaped the architecture of a product as it grew, making clear decisions about what to build into the platform and what to keep specific to a customer or use case.
• You’ve led engineers and helped a team do its best work through hiring, technical direction, honest feedback, and a high bar for shipping.
• You still write and ship production code. You want to lead from inside the work, not step away from it.
• You can earn a customer’s trust in a difficult technical conversation and take responsibility for resolving the underlying problem.
  

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping AI agents at startup or scale-up
• Experience with production agent challenges: reliability, evaluation, tool use, context, error handling
• Experience shaping product architecture as it scales

Green Flags to consider the Application

• Proven track record of personal contributions to shipped products
• Experience making architectural decisions about platform vs customer-specific features
• Experience turning research into product priorities
  

Red Flags for Application Rejection

• Big-company work cadence with no sign they'd adjust to early-stage intensity
• Lacks experience with agents

More information about my client: My Client is an applied research lab building a self-improving, model-agnostic agent harness that automates enterprise knowledge work.

Company Size: 1-10

Funding Stage: Seed

Founding Year: 2025

📩 APPLY NOW!

Send your resume + GitHub + Portfolio to: hrteam@recruitingbond.com

Subject: Head of Engineering – AI Agents (San Francisco, CA)