Engineering Lead

📋 Description

• • Pika Labs is at the forefront of AI-powered video generation, and we are seeking a highly motivated and technically adept Engineering Lead to spearhead a critical area of our rapidly evolving platform. This is a unique opportunity to join an early-stage, high-growth startup and make a significant impact on the future of creative technology. As an Engineering Lead, you will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction, driving architectural decisions, and ensuring the successful delivery of key features that define our user experience. You will lead a dedicated pod of talented engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performance environment while remaining deeply hands-on in the development process.
• • Your primary responsibility will be to own a significant domain within the Pika platform. This involves setting clear technical priorities, unblocking your team, and meticulously managing sprints to ensure consistent and timely delivery of high-quality software. You will be a hands-on leader, actively contributing to the codebase daily, taking ownership of major feature development, and making pivotal architecture decisions that will shape the long-term scalability and maintainability of our systems. This dual role requires a leader who is as comfortable diving deep into code as they are guiding and mentoring their team.
• • A core aspect of this role is driving the technical architecture for your designated area. You will be responsible for making crucial system design decisions, authoring Request for Comments (RFCs) to document and communicate these decisions, and building consensus across the engineering department. Your ability to articulate complex technical concepts and trade-offs will be essential in aligning the team and stakeholders towards a unified technical vision. This includes ensuring our architecture is robust, scalable, and adaptable to future innovations.
• • You will play a vital role in raising the overall engineering bar for the team and the company. This will be achieved through rigorous code reviews, providing architectural guidance, engaging in pair programming sessions, and offering dedicated mentorship to individual engineers. Your leadership will inspire technical excellence and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. By setting high standards for code quality, design patterns, and best practices, you will empower your team to build exceptional products.
• • Owning delivery from ambiguity to execution is paramount. You will be adept at breaking down vague product requirements into actionable, shippable milestones, meticulously planning and executing to meet deadlines. This requires a proactive approach to problem-solving, anticipating potential roadblocks, and ensuring the team has the resources and support needed to succeed. Your ability to translate product vision into tangible engineering outcomes will be critical to our success.
• • Collaboration is key to our agile environment. You will work closely with product managers, designers, and researchers to ensure that technical execution is tightly aligned with the overarching product vision. This cross-functional partnership will involve regular communication, feedback loops, and a shared commitment to delivering innovative solutions that delight our users.
• • Beyond feature development, you will contribute to the continuous improvement of our engineering processes. This includes enhancing our Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, strengthening our testing strategies, refining our on-call and incident response procedures, and optimizing our overall development workflows. Your insights will help us build more efficient, reliable, and scalable engineering operations.
• • As the team grows, you will be instrumental in recruiting and nurturing talent. This involves actively participating in the hiring process, onboarding new engineers, and contributing to the development of a strong, positive, and inclusive engineering culture at Pika Labs. Your leadership will shape the future of our engineering team.
• • This role is ideal for a seasoned engineer who is passionate about building cutting-edge technology, thrives in a fast-paced startup environment, and is eager to lead and mentor a team while remaining deeply engaged with the technical challenges of building a world-class AI product.