HEAD OF ENGINEERING
Pi.Security · San Francisco, CA · Full-time · Onsite, 5 days a week
ABOUT PI.SECURITY
Pi is building an agentic product security platform for teams that need to secure software at the speed they build it.
Modern development is accelerating, but security knowledge is still scattered across code, tickets, documents, incidents, reviews, and the people who remember why decisions were made. Pi turns that context into institutional security memory, helping teams triage faster, remediate in context, prevent repeat vulnerability classes, and embed security guardrails where engineering work already happens. We are building for a future where security is not a blocker at the end of the development process. It is part of how software gets designed, reviewed, shipped, and improved.
Pi was recognized on Fast Company's 2026 Next Big Things in Tech https://www.fastcompany.com/next-big-things-in-tech/list list and covered by Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/06/10/elon-musk-favorite-hacker-launches-100-million-ai-cyber-startup/!
ABOUT THE ROLE
We're hiring our first Head of Engineering to help lead the technical build-out of Pi's platform at a pivotal, early stage. You'll report directly to our CEO/co-founder and work shoulder-to-shoulder with a small, high-caliber team (fewer than 10 engineers today) as we scale the org. This is a hands-on leadership role: part of the week you'll be writing and reviewing code and making architectural calls, and part of the week you'll be hiring, mentoring, and shaping how the engineering team works as it grows.
This role is based in our San Francisco office, five days a week. We build in person, alongside the founding team, and that is a deliberate choice.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own execution of the engineering roadmap end to end, working closely with the CEO/co-founder on product and technical strategy.
- Stay hands-on — writing code, reviewing PRs, and making architecture and design decisions alongside the team, especially in the platform's core systems (codebase ingestion, root-cause analysis, remediation generation, and the Sloane assistant).
- Recruit, hire, and onboard Pi's next engineers, and put in place the processes, standards, and culture that let a small team move fast without breaking things.
- Set technical direction across the stack — backend services, AI/ML pipelines, integrations with customer developer workflows (source control, CI/CD, issue trackers) — balancing speed with the reliability and trust our security customers require.
- Partner cross-functionally with founders on customer-facing technical conversations, including with security and engineering leaders at our customers.
- Build engineering practices (testing, code review, on-call, incident response) that scale as the team and customer base grow, without over-engineering for a startup's current stage.
- Champion security and quality in our own engineering practices — as a security company, how we build has to hold up to scrutiny.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Proven experience as a hands-on engineering leader (e.g., Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, or Staff/Principal Engineer moving into leadership) at an early- or growth-stage startup, ideally having helped scale a team from single digits.
- Strong full-stack or backend engineering background, with the technical depth to be a real contributor, not just a manager — you should be comfortable in the codebase, not just in planning docs.
- Experience building and shipping complex, data-intensive, or AI/ML-driven products, ideally involving large codebases, static/dynamic analysis, or developer tooling.
- A track record of hiring and developing strong engineers, and of building engineering culture and process from a small base.
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous startup environment, with the judgment to know when to move fast and when to slow down (especially given the security-critical nature of the product).
- Excellent communication…