Head of Engineering (Quench)

About the Company: We are a venture-backed AI startup on a mission to reinvent how medical-legal document processing is solved using cutting-edge generative AI. Founded by a UCSF physician and serial entrepreneur, and backed by top-tier investors, we're building category-defining technology with real-world impact — already partnering with leading law firms and medical experts in workers' compensation, personal injury, and medical malpractice cases. With the legal tech market projected to hit $37B by 2027, we're uniquely positioned to process thousands of medical records and generate reports in hours, not weeks. We are a venture-backed AI startup on a mission to reinvent how the medical-legal industry is working by using cutting-edge generative AI. Founded by serial entrepreneurs and backed by top-tier investors, we’re building category-defining technology with real-world impact — already partnering with leading enterprises and growing rapidly. As our Head of Engineering, you will play a crucial role in scaling our proven platform from its current foundation to enterprise-grade production systems. You will have significant autonomy to evolve the tech stack, establish engineering best practices, and build a high-performing team of experts across full-stack engineering and AI/ML. Key Responsibilities:

Define and execute technical vision: Guide the evolution of our product from proven prototype to production-grade scalability, architecting intelligent, data-driven systems capable of handling complex medical-legal document pipelines.

Own critical infrastructure: Lead the design and implementation of robust systems for large-scale document processing, metadata extraction, vector search, RAG workflows, and sophisticated asynchronous processing pipelines.

Master distributed systems: Architect and optimize complex async workflows using AWS Step Functions, Lambda, and microservices to coordinate multi-stage document processing, AI model interactions, and data transformations at scale.

Build and lead the team: Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier full-stack engineers, data scientists, and technical leaders, establishing a strong engineering culture centered on velocity, reliability, and continuous improvement.

Drive technical execution: Ensure timely delivery of high-impact features and platform capabilities, taking ownership of significant projects from conception through deployment.

Establish engineering excellence: Implement best practices around code quality, testing, deployment automation, monitoring, and documentation; champion TDD and comprehensive testing strategies.

Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with product, medical experts, legal professionals, and business stakeholders to align technical strategy with market needs and business growth.

Ensure enterprise readiness: Oversee secure, compliant infrastructure meeting industry-specific requirements for healthcare and legal data handling.

Evaluate and adopt technologies: Stay ahead of the curve on AI models, infrastructure, frameworks, and tools to maintain our competitive edge in the legal-tech/med-tech intersection.

Required Skills & Experience:

Senior technical leadership: 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in technical leadership roles (team lead, principal engineer, or engineering manager)

Full-stack expertise: Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript/React/Next.js frontend and Python backend development; comfortable navigating the entire stack

AWS cloud proficiency: Deep experience with AWS services including Lambda, Step Functions, S3, DynamoDB, RDS (PostgreSQL), SQS, and infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred)

Asynchronous systems: Proven ability to design and implement sophisticated async processing pipelines, distributed workflows, and state management across services

AI/ML integration: Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, vector databases, RAG systems, prompt engineering, and document AI services

Data pipeline design: Experience architecting secure, scalable data systems handling structured and unstructured inputs, with attention to compliance and auditability

Systems thinking: Track record of designing for scale, performance optimization, API integration, and enterprise-grade reliability

Product mindset: Ability to translate user pain points and business requirements into technical priorities; comfortable engaging with customers and domain experts.

Team building: Demonstrated success recruiting, mentoring, and growing engineering talent; fostering collaborative, high-performing teams

Bonus Points:

Experience building 0→1 products or early-stage technical leadership at a VC-backed startup

Prior experience in healthcare technology, legal tech, or regulated industries

Background with document processing at scale, OCR, PDF manipulation

Multi-tenant SaaS architecture experience

Go microservices development

Kubernetes and container orchestration

Machine learning pipelines and model deployment

Open-source contributions or technical thought leadership

Experience with streaming data processing (Kafka, Flink) or real-time systems

Why Join Us as Head of Engineering:

Founding-level impact — Shape both the product and technical vision as an early engineering leader, with your decisions directly influencing the company's trajectory

Build on proven foundation — Inherit an established, working platform with room for significant innovation and scale, rather than starting from scratch

Solve hard problems — Tackle sophisticated challenges around distributed async systems, large-scale document processing, and cutting-edge AI integration

Cross-disciplinary collaboration — Work alongside accomplished physician and legal domain experts, bringing together technical excellence with deep clinical and legal insights

High autonomy & ownership — Full authority over technical strategy, architecture decisions, team design, and execution approach

Market intersection — Operate at the convergence of legal-tech and med-tech, two rapidly growing sectors with massive market opportunity

Meaningful equity — Significant ownership stake rewarding you as a foundational team member

Remote-friendly — Work from anywhere in the US with a distributed-first culture