About the Company and Why Join
Epic Slope Partners is a small, ambitious team building a new product at an exciting inflection point. The core concept is validated, the vision is clear, and the team is moving fast to put it in front of users at scale. This moment offers a blank canvas with no legacy systems or architectural debt, allowing the decisions made in the first few months to define the product for years. The founding team comes from a business and product background, moving fast with a clear vision. As Head of Engineering, you will be the sole technical voice from day one, with a genuine seat at the table and full ownership of how the product is built.
Why Join Now
- Own every technical decision from the ground up.
- The product is real and moving to market, not a whiteboard exercise.
- Work with founders deeply invested in the product and who move fast, providing direct access to decision-makers.
- Receive meaningful equity at the earliest possible stage, with the upside of building something before it scales.
- Tackle hard, interesting problems across infrastructure, product, and team building simultaneously.
The Opportunity
The founding team has taken the product from concept to an initial working version and proven the core idea. They are now ready to bring in an engineering leader to own the technical side entirely: hardening the foundations, scaling it responsibly, and building the engineering function. You will inherit working code and a clear direction, with the job of taking it from there. You will own the full engineering surface: backend, infrastructure, deployment, and the hiring of the first engineers. Reporting directly to the founders, you will be the single most important technical voice in every architectural and product decision. This role is ideal for engineers who want broad ownership, fast iteration cycles, and the satisfaction of building something that actually ships and grows.
What You Will Own
Architecture and Technical Direction
- Own the overall system architecture and make key build-vs-buy calls as the product scales.
- Set the technical roadmap in close partnership with the founders, balancing speed to market with long-term maintainability.
- Identify and address reliability, performance, and scalability risks proactively.
- Evaluate and evolve the technology stack as usage grows and requirements sharpen.
Platform Reliability and Scale
- Design and implement the infrastructure needed to serve a growing user base reliably and cost-efficiently.
- Drive observability across the stack: structured logging, alerting, distributed tracing, and on-call runbooks.
- Architect systems that handle spiky, variable workloads without dropped jobs or runaway costs.
- Implement cost monitoring for business visibility into operational expenses.
Backend and Product Engineering
- Lead backend development: API design, service architecture, data modelling, and integration with third-party systems.
- Evolve the data model to support new features, team workspaces, usage metering, and billing.
- Own the CI/CD strategy, environment parity (dev, staging, production), and secrets management.
- Codify infrastructure as code and establish deployment pipelines for quick, confident shipping.
Team and Culture
- Hire and onboard the first engineer to form a 2-member engineering team, defining quality from the first pull request.
- Establish code review standards, engineering processes, and on-call practice from day one.
- Partner with founders on technical roadmap prioritization and represent engineering to customers, investors, and future hires.
What We Are Looking For
Non-negotiable
- Minimum 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role.
- A track record of scaling a product from early stage to meaningful user volume, having personally owned architecture that served tens of thousands of concurrent users.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, async processing, and database design at scale.
- Deep experience with cloud infrastructure on GCP, AWS, or Azure: containers, managed databases, object storage, and auto-scaling compute.
- Experience with distributed job queue systems and their failure modes.
- A builder's mindset: comfortable writing code, reviewing PRs, and being in the details alongside a small team.
- Clear communicator able to explain architectural trade-offs to non-engineers and make pragmatic decisions under uncertainty.
Strongly Preferred
- Ability to get hands dirty and get things done.
- Experience hiring and growing a small engineering team, including defining role profiles and running interviews.
- Familiarity with AI or ML API integration patterns: orchestration, fallback chains, cost management across providers.
- Exposure to GPU compute, media processing, or other compute-intensive pipeline environments.
- Experience with modern frontend frameworks sufficient to review frontend PRs and make informed API design decisions.
The Kind of Person Who Thrives Here
- Prefers a working prototype over a perfect spec and knows when to switch modes.
- Gets frustrated by flaky infrastructure and fixes it systematically.
- Can explain a cost model or latency budget to a founder in plain English.
- Cares about the user experience downstream of infrastructure choices, viewing reliability and performance concretely.
- Energized by ownership, not anxious about it.