Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering

What's the role

Estuary powers "right-time" data replication and transform: from sub-second CDC replication to terabyte-scale OLAP data flows. That spans a lot of surface area, including a streaming runtime and control plane, hundreds of source and destination integrations, a transformation and SQL experience our users live in daily, and a growing set of AI capabilities on top of all of it.

We're hiring a VP of Engineering to own the engineering function: strategy, people, delivery, and operations. You'll join the leadership team as a partner to our founder CTO, owning engineering's direction as well as its delivery, while the CTO stays deep in architecture and the long-range technical bets.

Day to day, that means growing the leaders who run our teams, deciding what the organization needs to look like twelve and twenty-four months out, and being accountable for what engineering ships and what it costs. You're not starting from zero: engineering is already organized into teams with capable leads who own real scope and ship a product customers depend on daily. What's changing is scale: in the surface area we support, in what we ask each team to own, and in the size of the customers betting their data infrastructure on us.

We will grow the team, but headcount is not our primary lever. Estuary's leverage comes from strong tooling, clear ownership, and a high hiring bar, and we add people when the work genuinely demands it rather than on a schedule. The job here is making a compact team formidable rather than building a large one.

What you'll do

• Own the engineering roadmap and its execution. Be accountable for what we ship, when, and at what quality. Develop the processes and team loops that wrangle the competing needs of customers, partners, marketing, operations, and long-term product vision into a focused and achievable technical pipeline, across every part of the stack rather than one slice of it.
• Set technical strategy with the CTO. Own the engineering half of where the product goes: build versus buy, what we invest in ahead of demand, which architectural bets are worth the disruption, and what we deliberately don't do. Make the case for those choices to the co-founders and, when it matters, to the board.
• Grow leaders. Develop the tech leads/engineering managers already running our teams, and grow their ranks as the org expands. Coach on the judgment calls that come with scope: where to set the bar, when to decide with incomplete information, how to have the hard conversation early. Build the management practice at Estuary, including how we level, review, and grow people, on top of the culture that's already here.
• Design the org ahead of the need. Judge when a team has grown past its structure, where a new one should form, how ownership gets redrawn as the product expands, and when to add process. Own headcount planning and the engineering budget, and defend both, including the decision not to hire. Layer the right practices at the right time, and no sooner.
• Represent engineering at the company level. Set expectations with the co-founders and with our compliance, marketing, sales, and support leads. Turn strategy into sequenced, staffed commitments, and surface the constraints, including what's achievable, what it costs, and what breaks, early enough to change the plan. Show up for the customer conversations where an engineering leader is what closes the gap.
• Own reliability as a business outcome. Define what our SLOs should be with the people who sell and support the product, then hold the organization to them. Safeguard Estuary's "fix bugs first" culture and protect our reputation for customer support and success as we grow.
• Operational excellence. Develop and champion quality standards and strategies for risk minimization across the platform. Improve development processes and developer experience. Own our engineering posture on security and compliance as our customers get larger and their diligence gets sharper.
• Hiring engine. Partner with in-house recruiting, who own sourcing, to shape the rest of the engineering candidate experience: screening, interview structure, scoring, and onboarding. Own leadership hiring yourself. Keep the bar high as we grow.
• Stay close to the work. You'll read design proposals, ask the right questions, and hold your own in a technical debate about our stack. You won't be in the critical path of shipping, but a VP here is expected to have opinions grounded in how the system actually works.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building software, with 4+ years leading engineering teams, including experience as a manager of managers.
• Experience owning an engineering function in the range of 20 to 50 engineers. What interests us is the leverage you got out of that team rather than how large it became.
• A track record of developing engineering leaders, not just engineers. You can point to specific people whose careers accelerated under you, and to managers you hired who are still leading well.
• Depth in data-intensive systems such as distributed systems, streaming, storage, or query engines, plus the judgment to hold a credible technical conversation across a broad stack you don't personally own.
• Proven ability to lead, introduce structure, and nurture engineering excellence across multiple teams in a complex domain, preferably B2B. This includes inheriting a functioning organization and earning its trust before changing how it works.
• Experience partnering with a founder or CTO on technical strategy, including the part where you disagree productively.
• Comfort spanning infrastructure work and user-facing product work, and setting priorities between them.
• Ability to communicate at all levels, and discuss nuanced technical concepts with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, up to and including customers and the board.
• Experience leading and organizing incident response in high stakes settings.

How we work

• High autonomy; engineers own the full feature lifecycle and often engage directly with users.
• Remote-first, Slack-centric, async-friendly with VCs as needed.
• Global team with a skew towards east-coast working hours.

Compensation & leveling

Market-competitive cash + equity.