You will be getting in at a pivotal stage, owning the technical strategic roadmap, building a world-class technical team, and working in a small, agile, flat organization to evolve our R&D initiatives into a live, scaled operational platform that will have an impact across the industry.
As Head of Engineering, you will lead a small, senior team of graphics, systems, and platform engineers building deeply technical infrastructure: browser-native runtimes, GPU-accelerated rendering pipelines, low-latency streaming, and the cloud backbone behind it. You will own the technical roadmap end-to-end and partner closely with the CEO to translate product priorities into clear architectural direction.
Parallelz is an AI-native organization. We are not looking for a leader who tolerates AI tooling. We are looking for one who runs on it. You should already think of agentic systems and LLM-based tooling as a core part of how you architect, ship, debug, and review software, and you should be able to push that culture and discipline through an entire engineering team.
Key Responsibilities- Own the architectural design and technical roadmap end-to-end across the product and our cloud-based infrastructure, partnering closely with the CEO to translate business and product priorities into clear technical direction while ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Lead and grow a small, senior team of engineers working across graphics (WebGL, WebGPU, OpenGL ES), Android/Linux internals, browser engines, network programming, WASM, WebRTC, DevOps, and cloud.
- Recruit, hire, and develop a world-class, mission-driven technical team, with a high bar for AI-native working style as a baseline expectation, not a bonus.
- Champion and operationalize an AI-native engineering culture: integrate agentic and AI tooling into design, code, review, testing, debugging, and ops; define the patterns, guardrails, and quality bars that let the team move at AI-accelerated velocity without losing rigor.
- Provide hands-on technical guidance to senior ICs, going deep with the team when problems warrant it.
- Facilitate collaboration and information sharing across a hybrid team, with a strong bias toward written, asynchronous, AI-leveraged workflows.
- Promote a culture of first-principles problem-solving where engineers understand every layer of the systems they touch.
- Own the candidate and employee lifecycle for direct reports: hiring, onboarding, goal-setting, performance management, and career development.
RequirementsMust Haves:- Prior experience in a senior engineering leadership role (VP of Engineering, Head of Engineering, Director of Engineering, Engineering Manager, Technical Director), or a Principal/Staff IC role with proven architectural ownership of a complex software product.
- Deep, daily fluency with AI coding agents, LLM tooling, and agentic systems, with a clear point of view on where they help, where they fail, and how to verify their output.
- Track record of driving team-level adoption of AI-native workflows, not just personal use.
- Experience in a zero-to-one, venture-backed startup environment.
- A passion for invention and a track record of building innovative emerging technologies with strong R&D foundations.
- Track record of shipping live products under rapid iterative development.
- Strong believer in smaller, more senior, highly collaborative teams enabled by aggressive automation and AI leverage.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to operate in a hybrid environment.
Nice to Haves:- Hands-on background or leadership experience in deeply technical, performance-critical software: graphics programming (WebGL, WebGPU, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, game/browser engines), low-level systems (C/C++, AOSP/Android, Linux internals), WASM, WebRTC, or real-time streaming.
- Experience managing and scaling cloud-based production infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP, alongside familiarity with modern DevOps practices.
- Background in advanced compression, video encoding, AdTech, or Mobile SDK ecosystems.
- Technical product management experience.
- Graduate work and/or a research background in a related area.
Benefits- Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation
- Comprehensive benefits package (health, dental, vision), including Health and Wellness spending account
- Generous time off policies
- Access to leading AI tools and platforms
