Head of Engineering

This is a Full-Time role based in Orange County, CA (Newport Beach / Irvine, in person 3+ days) and reports to the CEO.

About Solvable

Solvable is rebuilding how Americans discover, evaluate, and access auto and home insurance.

We help consumers lower their auto and home insurance premiums without sacrificing coverage or service. Under the hood, we are building an AI-first marketplace powered by conversational agents, agentic marketing systems, predictive intelligence, and real-time consumer + carrier routing.

We've already helped millions of consumers save money. Now we're scaling aggressively and investing in owned platform, data, and decisioning capability as a core competitive advantage.

Why This Role Now

We're hiring a Head of Engineering to own the platform end to end: the data foundation, the conversion signal infrastructure, the owned consumer runtime, and the models that decide what we ask, show, route, and sell.

Our engineering team is senior and distributed offshore. It is producing real work. What it does not have is an owner in the business's time zone: someone accountable for architecture, delivery, and uptime who is awake when the numbers break and in the room when the decisions get made.

• This is not a delivery-management seat.
• This is not a role where you set strategy and delegate.

This is a builder's role with a leadership mandate. You'll write production code in your first 30 days, review everyone else's, and be personally accountable for systems that make money every hour. You'll know you're doing it right when the business stops asking which number is correct.

Your Impact

You will own Solvable's engineering function across four core domains.

1. Revenue Truth & The Data Platform

• Own the data foundation end to end: ingestion, transformation, governance, lineage, and quality gates on a modern lakehouse
• Reconcile spend, leads, routing outcomes, partner results, and gross profit into one source the business acts on
• Replace fragmented, manually assembled reporting with governed, explainable, self-serve access
• Set and hold the standard for freshness, accuracy, consent handling, and access control across consumer data

2. Measurement Infrastructure

• Own the measurement infrastructure, canonical event model, and partner callback capture that carry attribution for every dollar of media spend
• Migrate revenue-critical tracking off shared infrastructure without disrupting live revenue, validated in parallel, never big-bang
• Make measurement reliable enough that media, finance, and our platform partners all work from the same numbers

3. Owned Runtime & Experimentation Velocity

• Own the consumer experience and the monetization services behind it: intake, consent, routing, offer presentation, and partner handoff
• Build the instrumentation that lets product run conversion, yield, and lifecycle experiments in parallel, idea to instrumented test in days rather than weeks
• Protect uptime and latency on revenue-critical paths

4. Decisioning, ML & The Team

• Sequence and build the intelligence layer: lead quality scoring, expected-value routing, and bind probability, trained on our own outcome data
• Lead, mentor, and hold the technical bar for a senior distributed team across full-stack, data, and infrastructure
• Own hiring, ramp, operating cadence, and capacity planning, including the US engineering roles that follow this one
• Answer the question we ask of every role at Solvable: why can't a system do this?

Responsibilities

• Set architecture and make the calls, then stay close enough to ship. You will be in the codebase.
• Run delivery: sprint cadence, spec quality, and a forecast leadership trusts
• Serve as the senior technical resource and daily escalation point for a distributed team several hours ahead
• Own CI/CD, observability, role-based access, PII and consent handling, and auditability
• Work directly with platform and data partners on integrations, requirements, and technical negotiation
• Report to the CEO and present progress against gates to the board

What We're Looking For

A top notch AI-native engineering leader who is equally as competent writing production code as they are building and leading a team.

Experience & Track Record

• 8+ years building software, 3+ leading engineering teams that shipped revenue-critical systems
• You have personally owned a production data pipeline the business bet revenue on, and you know what it feels like when finance finds the error before you do
• You have migrated off shared or partner infrastructure without breaking revenue
• You have shipped production ML that changed an operational decision. Not dashboards, not research.
• You have led engineers across a time-zone gap and you have a real method for it, not just good intentions

Technical Fluency (Non-Negotiable)

• Hands-on with our stack or close equivalents: AWS (Fargate, Kinesis, Glue, Redshift), Python, TypeScript/Node, modern data tooling (dbt, Iceberg or equivalent lakehouse patterns), event-driven architecture
• You have written production code in the last six months
• AI-native. You use AI tooling to collapse execution cost and you expect the same from your team.
• You think in tradeoffs and can defend an architecture decision on cost, risk, and time to revenue

Fit

• You thrive in ambiguity and would rather define the plan than receive it
• Performance marketing, lead generation, insurtech, or ad-tech experience is a strong plus. If you don't have it, you'll be fluent in CPL, RPL, ROAS, and attribution within your first month.
• Based in Orange County or committed to relocating. This role exists because the business needs its engineering owner in the same time zone and the same building. Regular in-person time is the job, not a preference.

Compensation

Base salary is $210,000 to $250,000, and we anchor mid-market on cash so we can pay the difference in scope and equity. The package also includes an annual performance bonus gated on a year-end scorecard and an equity grant vesting over four years with a one-year cliff, which is where the real significant upside sits.

Your First 90 Days

Days 1–30 · Take the reins. Own the delivery board, sprint cadence, and a forecast leadership trusts. Classify every route through our current tracking infrastructure: analytical, routing, monetization, and callback. Inventory source systems, owners, and access boundaries. One-on-ones with every engineer and with the media, product, and creative leads. Ship something small to production in week two.

Days 31–60 · Make the numbers true. Daily reporting live with visible freshness and discrepancy states, validated against the incumbent path. Canonical event model implemented for revenue-critical flows. You are the engineering team's daily escalation point and the delivery path runs through you. Deliver your written read on team structure and what the org needs next.

Days 61–90 · Prove it. Conversion signal fully owned and accepted by media and finance, with the legacy path decommissioned or on a dated plan. All new work shipping on our own CI/CD. First expected-value or lead-quality model specified against real outcome data. Next-year engineering capacity plan delivered, with the AI-leverage case for every proposed role.

How We Hire

Our process is built around live work, not rehearsed answers. Expect a real diagnostic exercise with no prep time, a system design conversation on a problem we are actually solving, a scenario walkthrough under time pressure, an onsite in Newport Beach, and backchannel references. It is demanding on purpose, and it is the same standard we hold ourselves to.

Solvable is an equal opportunity employer. Compensation ranges are good-faith estimates for Southern California and final offers depend on experience and scope.