You bring both the technical depth and the leadership range this role demands. Specifically: 10+ years in engineering, 5+ years leading multiple teams simultaneously — you know the difference between managing people and building an org You've made real architectural calls on LLM-based products — not just used APIs, but decided how they fit into a production system at enterprise scale Hands-on with the modern LLM stack: prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG, evaluation frameworks, and inference infrastructure Strong cloud-native background (AWS / GCP / Azure) — you've operated distributed systems in production, not just on paper Data pipeline native — you think in flows, volumes, and efficiency; experience with high-throughput event-driven architectures You've worked in fintech, regtech, or another regulated environment and understand that 'good enough' isn't a compliance strategy You're as comfortable in a co-founder conversation about product direction as you are in a code review You've built in ambiguity before and didn't wait for someone to hand you a plan You’re probably not a fit if… You need a fully scoped roadmap before you can start moving — we're building the roadmap together You've only led one team at a time and haven't navigated the coordination overhead of multiple teams with different contexts Your LLM experience is theoretical or limited to side projects — this role requires production-grade decisions under enterprise SLAs You measure your success by headcount, meetings, or process — we measure it by what shipped Regulated industries feel like a constraint to you rather than a design input You don’t feel comfortable having conversations that raise the bar with your team members You don’t feel comfortable to be customer facing and deeply interfacing with the business What Success Looks Like Your first 90 days goals: Day 30 — You're across all three team architectures, cross-product dependencies, and commit flows. You know where the bodies are buried.
