Head of Engineering

Location: Charlotte, NC Salary: $225,000.00 USD Annually - $265,000.00 USD Annually Description:
About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Head of Engineering to lead a critical product domain within our supply chain platform for perishable goods. In this environment, timing, traceability, reliability, and operational excellence are core product requirements.

Reporting directly to the CTO, you will own your domain end-to-end, including technical strategy, architecture, engineering execution, team development, quality, and business outcomes. You will lead a lean, high-performing engineering organization that delivers through an agentic software development lifecycle (SDLC), where AI-assisted workflows help accelerate specification, development, testing, and review while maintaining human accountability at every stage.

This role is designed for a technical leader who can think strategically, make sound architectural decisions, develop engineering talent, and engage deeply in technical discussions when needed. While you will not be the primary implementer, you will be expected to provide technical direction, evaluate complex tradeoffs, and guide your teams through critical decisions.

What You'll Do
Technical Leadership & Ownership

• Own the technical direction, architecture, delivery, quality, and operational performance of a product domain.
• Make and guide architectural decisions that balance scalability, reliability, maintainability, and business needs.
• Evaluate technical proposals from engineering leads and teams, challenging assumptions and identifying risks when necessary.
• Provide technical guidance during critical design reviews, production incidents, and high-impact initiatives.
• Establish engineering standards, development practices, and quality expectations across your domain.

Engineering Management

• Lead and develop a lean, senior engineering organization consisting of:
  • Engineering leads
  • Senior full-stack engineers
  • Early-career engineers and new graduates
  • Offshore specialist teams
• Coach managers and senior contributors, helping them grow their technical and leadership capabilities.
• Build a strong succession pipeline and continuously strengthen team capabilities.

Agentic Software Delivery

• Drive delivery through an AI-enabled engineering workflow where agents assist with specification generation, coding, testing, code review, and quality assurance.
• Ensure appropriate human oversight and accountability throughout the development lifecycle.
• Improve team effectiveness by helping engineers leverage AI tooling and automation in a disciplined, high-quality manner.
• Continuously optimize engineering processes to improve throughput, quality, and speed of delivery.

Quality, Reliability & Operations

• Maintain a high standard for system reliability and operational excellence.
• Ensure systems support real-world supply chain requirements, including inventory accuracy, shipment timing, traceability, and compliance.
• Proactively identify technical debt, operational risks, and scalability challenges before they impact customers.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with Product, TPM, Security, Operations, and peer engineering leaders to align roadmaps and execution priorities.
• Influence platform investments and shared engineering initiatives across the organization.
• Communicate technical strategy, progress, and risk clearly to executive stakeholders and board-level audiences.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success includes:

• Consistent delivery of high-quality software through the agentic development pipeline.
• Faster idea-to-production cycles while maintaining engineering standards.
• Increased engineering leverage and measurable improvements in team productivity.
• Strong collaboration between onshore and offshore teams.
• Successful onboarding and development of agent-native early-career engineers.
• Reliable systems that meet demanding operational and traceability requirements.
• A growing bench of engineering leaders capable of taking on larger responsibilities.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience.
• 6+ years of engineering leadership experience managing senior engineers and technical teams.
• Proven experience owning delivery and outcomes for a production software product or platform domain.
• Strong system design and architecture expertise with the ability to review and evaluate technical implementations.
• Experience leading distributed engineering organizations across onshore and offshore teams.
• Demonstrated ability to balance engineering quality, business priorities, and delivery timelines.
• Experience communicating technical decisions, risks, and strategy to executive stakeholders.
• Experience working in high-accountability environments where teams are responsible for outcomes end-to-end.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI-assisted development, agentic engineering workflows, LLM-powered tooling, or related software delivery approaches.
• Experience improving engineering productivity through automation, AI, or modern developer platforms.
• Background in supply chain, logistics, inventory management, warehouse systems, food safety, traceability, IoT, sensor-based systems, or similarly complex operational domains.
• Experience leading small, highly leveraged engineering teams that consistently deliver outsized results.
• Experience presenting technical roadmaps, investment priorities, and risk assessments to board-level audiences.

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