Head of Engineering

Magical

$180K — $220K *
Healthcare
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-10 years of experience in technical leadership within AI or healthcare sectors
  • Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams in high-growth environments
  • Deep knowledge of LLMs, AI systems, and production reliability
  • Strong understanding of enterprise security and compliance, such as HIPAA and SOC 2
  • Ability to communicate effectively with enterprise executives and technical teams
  • Experience with system architecture and hands-on engineering practices
  • Capacity for direct communication and fostering a culture of high standards

Responsibilities

  • Own the technical direction for the AI platform, ensuring reliability and security
  • Build systems that enable reliable deployment of probabilistic AI in healthcare
  • Drive the evolution of the platform for quicker and scalable customer deployments
  • Lead engineering quality initiatives including incident response and performance expectations
  • Establish customer-facing technical credibility and build trust with healthcare executives
  • Recruit, hire, and develop top-tier AI and infrastructure engineers
  • Collaborate with Product and GTM teams for integrated product direction

Benefits

  • Work in a critical, transformative role within a rapidly growing company
  • Opportunity to influence the future of AI in healthcare
  • Collaborative and fast-paced environment focused on technical excellence
  • Exposure to high-stakes enterprise conversations and decision-making
  • Potential for professional growth within a category-leading organization
Full Job Description
The role

This is not a classic VP Engineering role.

We are not looking for someone whose main value is process, org charts, or big-company operating discipline. We need a deeply technical, product-minded, customer-facing engineering leader who wants to build.

You will own the technical direction of the platform, scale a senior engineering team, partner closely with Product and GTM, and represent Magical in high-stakes conversations with enterprise healthcare executives and technical buyers.

The right person can move from architecture review to roadmap debate to customer escalation to recruiting close without losing altitude.

What you will own
  • Technical direction across our AI platform, reliability, security, observability, and deployment architecture
  • The systems that make probabilistic AI reliable enough for enterprise healthcare workflows
  • The evolution of the platform so customer deployments become faster, more repeatable, and more scalable
  • Engineering quality, speed, ownership, architecture review, incident response, planning, hiring, and performance expectations
  • Customer-facing technical credibility across security, reliability, architecture, and product direction
  • Hiring and developing exceptional AI-native engineers, product engineers, infrastructure engineers, and technical leaders
What we are looking for
  • Deep technical judgment in LLMs, agents, evals, orchestration, reliability, model behavior, and production AI systems
  • A platform builder who thinks in primitives, workflows, observability, governance, developer experience, and repeatability
  • Strong product and business judgment around deployment speed, customer trust, scalability, and defensibility
  • Customer-facing credibility with enterprise executives and technical buyers
  • Experience scaling a high-caliber engineering team through an ambiguous, high-growth stage
  • Strong architecture instincts and the ability to earn respect from senior engineers without making every decision yourself
  • Fluency in enterprise security and healthcare trust requirements: HIPAA, SOC 2, PHI, permissions, auditability, logs, and data access
  • Low ego, high standards, direct communication, and founder-level urgency
Why this matters

Agentic automation will not win in healthcare because the demos are impressive.

It will win when the systems are reliable, secure, observable, governed, and economically transformative.

That is the engineering problem.

If we get it right, Magical becomes one of the core platforms healthcare organizations use to deploy AI workers across their most important operational workflows, even when the systems underneath are fragmented, old, and closed.

This is a rare chance to lead engineering at the moment a company moves from early customer pull to category leadership.

What this role is not

This is not the right role for someone who wants to manage from a distance.

We are not looking for:
  • A traditional enterprise VP Engineering whose main strength is managing managers
  • A big-company operator who wants to add heavy process before the team needs it
  • A pure AI researcher who does not want to own production systems, customers, reliability, and business outcomes
  • A leader whose experience is limited to legacy automation models and is not excited to build AI-native systems
  • A backend-only architect who does not want to spend time with customers, GTM, and enterprise buyers
  • A sales-engineering profile who can explain the product but cannot lead architecture, execution, and engineering quality
  • A healthcare operator who understands the market but lacks world-class technical depth

We need someone technical enough to earn trust, commercial enough to understand the stakes, and hands-on enough to help the company move faster.

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