Lazo - Head of Engineering

📋 Description

• • Lazo is seeking a visionary and hands-on Head of Engineering to spearhead the technical development and scaling of its innovative AI-powered operating system for modern startups. This pivotal role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of a rapidly growing company, backed by prominent investors such as AlleyCorp, AWS Startups, Google for Startups, Endeavor, and Tampa Bay Wave. You will be instrumental in evolving Lazo's multi-agent AI platform from its foundational stages to a robust, scalable solution, driving both strategic technical direction and direct code contributions.
• • As the Head of Engineering, you will operate at the intersection of strategic leadership and practical execution. Your responsibilities will encompass defining the overarching technology strategy and roadmap, ensuring its alignment with the company's business objectives and product OKRs. A key aspect of this role involves architecting the reference architecture for agentic systems, which includes the intricate orchestration of Large Language Models (LLMs), tool integration, data plane management, and the implementation of critical safety features and evaluation frameworks.
• • You will also be responsible for establishing and maintaining stringent security and compliance baselines. This includes defining and enforcing policies around Identity and Access Management (IAM), secrets management, data privacy, and preparing the organization for SOC 2 readiness. Furthermore, you will implement robust cost governance strategies, focusing on FinOps to ensure efficient resource utilization as the platform scales. Regular presentations of trade-offs, identified risks, and progress updates to the leadership team, including weekly reviews and Monthly/Quarterly Business Reviews (MBR/QBR), will be a core part of your engagement.
• • Beyond strategy, this role demands significant hands-on engineering involvement. You will be expected to ship backend services using Python and/or TypeScript, actively contributing high-impact pull requests and conducting thorough code reviews to maintain code quality and foster a culture of technical excellence. A significant part of your work will involve orchestrating complex agentic workflows and toolchains, potentially utilizing frameworks like ADK, BeeAI, or n8n, and integrating various external APIs and databases to build resilient data pipelines.
• • A comprehensive understanding of end-to-end DevOps practices is crucial. This includes managing cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP, leveraging containerization technologies like Docker, implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform or CDK, and establishing robust CI/CD pipelines. You will also be responsible for implementing and maintaining comprehensive observability solutions, encompassing logs, metrics, and traces, and designing an effective on-call rotation and incident response strategy.
• • Driving continuous improvement in system performance and reliability is paramount. You will focus on reducing technical debt, optimizing latency and throughput, and actively managing infrastructure costs on a per-workflow and per-client basis. This involves defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets, and actively working to decrease Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) and change-fail rates, aligning with DORA and SRE best practices.
• • Ensuring the security and integrity of data is a top priority, especially within the context of AI features. You will define and implement data access policies, PII protection measures, and secure data flow mechanisms. Proactive incident management through thorough post-mortems and preventive engineering, including the development of runbooks, playbooks, and potentially chaos drills, will be essential to maintaining system stability.
• • As a player-coach, you will play a vital role in building and nurturing the engineering team. This includes actively participating in hiring processes, mentoring and developing engineers, and instilling best practices for quality and focused execution. You will establish clear performance scorecards, tracking key metrics such as DORA metrics, SRE indicators, lead time, and review SLAs, integrated with the company's operating system. Fostering a culture that values thoughtful trade-offs, rapid feedback loops, and clear documentation is fundamental to your leadership.
• • Cross-functional collaboration will be key to your success. You will partner closely with Product and AI teams to translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions. Close collaboration with Operations, Growth, and Customer Support teams will ensure seamless product launches, reliable service delivery, and effective supportability. You will also manage relationships with key vendors and partners, making informed build-vs-buy decisions with clear return on investment (ROI) justifications.
• • Success in this role will be measured by tangible improvements in DORA metrics (increased deployment frequency, reduced lead time, lower change-fail rate, decreased MTTR), consistently met SLOs with healthy error budgets, predictable incident management, enhanced AI quality through reproducible evaluations and safe tool usage, downward trending infrastructure costs with increased usage, and a high-performing, engaged engineering team with efficient onboarding and strong review SLAs.