Head of Application Engineering

Scion Ventures is hiring on behalf of one of our portfolio companies, an early-stage team building AI systems that work in the physical world. They are funded and live with paying customers, and deliberately quiet about the details in public. The company is not named publicly at this stage. We will tell you who it is on the first call.

THE ROLE

They are hiring one leader to own engineering for everything their customers touch: the iOS and Android apps, the web consoles, and the platform services behind them. This is a player-coach role: you set technical direction, you lead a small team, and you still write code 30 to 50% of the time. You are accountable for what ships.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Architecture, delivery, and quality for a camera-first mobile app (iOS and Android, phones and tablets) used by people on their feet in buildings with unreliable connectivity: capture, offline queueing, resumable background upload, guided task flows, notifications. The web consoles (React and TypeScript) used by customers and the internal operations team, and the SaaS platform behind them: multi-tenant data model, task and workflow engine, media ingestion and processing, real-time updates, reporting and export. Integrations with third‑party systems through REST APIs, webhooks, and OAuth, with idempotency, retries, and audit trails. Tenant isolation, role‑based access, and audit logging as non‑negotiable properties of the system, proven with tests. The engineering bar: code review, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, on‑call, and incident review. The team. Lead, hire, and mentor engineers, run technical design reviews, and unblock people. Planning with the founder and product: turn ambiguous customer needs into scoped, sequenced technical plans, and ship weekly.

WHAT THEY NEED

Required: 12+ years building and operating production software, including several years leading engineering teams as a director, head of engineering, or equivalent You have shipped iOS and Android apps to real users and owned them after launch (React Native, Flutter, or native Swift and Kotlin) You have built and operated a web app or SaaS product: React and TypeScript on the front end, TypeScript/Node or Python services, PostgreSQL, queues and background jobs, cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS) Depth in at least one of: offline‑first sync, camera and media pipelines on mobile, large-file upload under unreliable networks A track record as technical lead: you have set direction for a team and can show what shipped because of it Security‑minded by habit: multi‑tenancy, RBAC, secrets management, audit trails Clear written communication and comfort in a largely asynchronous team spanning US and India time zones Based in or willing to relocate to the Fremont area; this role is on‑site Strong bonus: On‑device ML inference (Core ML, TensorFlow Lite, ONNX) or integrating vision‑model outputs into product flows Barcode and QR scanning at scale; tablet‑first UX PDF and spreadsheet report generation; WebSockets; event‑driven architectures Early‑stage experience as one of the first ten engineers at a company

HOW THEY WORK

Small team, direct access to the founder, and customers you will meet in your first weeks. Written design docs before large builds, a weekly shipping cadence, and a bias to fixing root causes. On‑site hands‑on session, 3 hours. Founder conversation. Location: On‑site, Fremont, CA. Full‑time. Compensation: $125,000 to $150,000 base, 0.5% to 2.0% equity, health insurance premiums 100% paid by the company. #J-18808-Ljbffr Scion Ventures