[Hiring] Head of Engineering @Jona

Role Description

At Jona, we’re transforming how clinicians and consumers understand and optimize their gut microbiome. Our AI-powered platform decodes complex microbiome data and translates it into actionable insights—supporting better outcomes, stronger immunity, and longer health spans.

We’re looking for a player-coach, hands-on Head of Engineering to help us scale our core product. You’ll lead a small, high-performing team while staying close to the code—shipping features, shaping architecture, and bringing AI-powered capabilities into production.

This is a high-impact role: you’ll influence product direction, define how we build, and help turn ideas into real, user-facing systems fast.

• Experience going from 0 to 1: Own projects end-to-end, from ideation to delivery
• Architect systems: Design scalable backends, frontends, and AI-powered applications
• Build AI into the product: Integrate and operationalize ML models into various aspects of our product stack
• Establish MLOps foundations: Drive infrastructure for Model training, deployment and monitoring
• Collaborate tightly: Work directly with product, design, and data to move fast
• Raise the bar: Improve code quality, CI/CD, developer experience, and reliability
• Manage and mentor: Build, support, unblock, and grow a small team of engineers
• Culture: Nurture a high-performance and agile engineering culture

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience
• 3+ years of building and shipping modern AI-enabled web applications or platforms in production
• Experience leading small engineering teams and mentoring engineers while remaining highly hands-on
• Strong full-stack skills (TypeScript, React, Node.js)
• Experience designing scalable APIs and working with production databases, especially PostgreSQL and other SQL systems
• Experience with Docker/containers
• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience
• Solid experience with AWS and owning cloud/platform maturity
• 3+ years of experience deploying and operating ML/AI systems in production
• Strong familiarity with MLOps practices, including model lifecycle management, monitoring, deployment, and data/model pipelines
• Comfortable owning ambiguous problems and moving quickly
• Strong product instincts—you care about what gets built, not just how
• Exposure to regulated environments (e.g., healthcare/HIPAA)

Requirements

• Experience in health-tech and can communicate well with science/clinical stakeholders
• Experience in healthcare or a regulated data background is preferred
• Experience interviewing and helping hire strong engineers is preferred; experience building a small team is a plus
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Familiarity with NoSQL/vector/search stores is a plus

Benefits

• Medical, Dental & Vision: Competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents. This includes medical, dental, and vision premiums as well as a company contributed HSA/FSA.
• Retirement Matching: Jona has a 401k plan that offers company matching for dollars you contribute.
• Vacation Policy: Jona’s vacation policy is to take vacation. We operate on a Freedom and Responsibility model of unlimited PTO.
• Equity: We offer meaningful equity ownership, allowing team members to share directly in the long-term success of Jona.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range: $225-270K
• Equity