[Hiring] Head of Engineering @Acclinate

Role Description

We are looking for a hands-on player-coach to own our engineering function and continue scaling AVA into an enterprise-grade platform. As a hands-on player-coach, you will lead and grow the engineering team while shipping code directly. You prioritize impact over flawless code, collaborating on customer calls to shape and deliver working software from minimal specs without waiting for extensive documentation. Balancing rapid innovation with strict healthcare compliance, you will establish a clear boundary between development speed and rigorous production releases.

What You Will Own

• Architecture & Systems
  • Own the architecture and the full-stack systems that handle complex proprietary data, analytics pipelines, and LLM-powered features.
  • Maintain and modernize our core technology stack, including GCP-native infrastructure (Cloud Run, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Vertex AI), containerization, CI/CD, and Ruby on Rails.
  • Lead in exploring the potential of a new stack to migrate and modernize the frontend/backend.
  • Own integrations across our data and business ecosystem, including Metabase, HubSpot, and other systems that connect product, analytics, customer, and operational data.
  • Think in systems; every feature touches an external platform, a background job, a database, an API contract, a client, and a customer's report.
• Data Confidence & Traceability
  • Be confident in the data; know where every number comes from, trace a wrong metric to its source, and fix the pipeline when an upstream platform changes.
  • Write the SQL that answers a customer's question and stand behind the number.
  • Build or run integrations that pull from third-party APIs, normalize messy external data into your own models, and keep reporting correct when the upstream changes.
• Quality & Delivery Standards
  • Own quality and delivery: small PRs, tests that prove the behavior, migrations that do not break a deploy, structured logs and traces.
  • Maintain strong security and compliance standards, including data security, audit trails, HIPAA compliance, and SOC 2 readiness.
  • Modernize engineering processes through streamlined code reviews, automated testing, and production monitoring.
• Product & Customer Partnership
  • Carry product judgment into code; join customer and partner calls when the work calls for it.
  • Serve as a strategic partner to Product, Community, Marketing, Customer Success, and Commercial teams.
• Team Building & Mentorship
  • Manage, mentor, and work alongside the existing engineering team, fostering a culture of fast iteration and technical excellence.
  • Build and scale the team intentionally - hiring engineers who excel in rapid prototyping, system architecture, and disciplined delivery.
  • Help onboard new engineers into the codebase and the customer context.
• AI-Native Development
  • Work AI-native; drive Claude Code, Cursor, or the equivalent for most of your output.
  • Write the repo instructions, decision records, and plans that make AI agents produce correct code the first time.
  • Review agent output with the same rigor you would give a junior engineer's PR.
  • Actively help the team improve how it leverages AI.

Qualifications

• Core Leadership & Engineering Capability
  • 8+ years of traditional engineering leadership who has recently pivoted to Claude-native thinking.
  • 5+ years who has already worked in AI-native shops.
  • 3–5 years who is exceptionally fast and shipping.
• Technical Depth
  • 5+ years building production systems.
  • Experience with data pipelines, data security, and integrating modern AI tooling or LLM APIs.
  • Strong cloud experience (GCP preferred).
  • Full-stack capability across backend architecture, data infrastructure, APIs, integrations, and front-end experiences.
  • Data-model-first thinking.
• AI Tooling Fluency
  • Daily use of AI coding agents on real codebases.
  • Ability to describe how to structure a repo for AI agents.
  • Use AI to accelerate development and improve productivity.
• Communication & Async-First Mindset
  • Plain, direct written communication.
  • Comfort with a small team and a real customer base.
  • Systems thinking; design for failure modes, not the happy path.

Benefits

• Compensation depends on experience and includes base salary, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance with 50% of premiums covered by the company.
• Generous Paid Time Off (PTO) policy alongside dedicated paid sick leave.