Head of Engineering

About the company Our client is a manufacturing company. The role Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Lead the engineering function of a growing company, setting technical direction and building the team that delivers it. Stay hands-on with system architecture and code while growing the organization from the ground up. The work spans customer-facing software, internal systems, data infrastructure and applied machine learning. What you'll do

• Set technical direction and an engineering roadmap across customer software, internal tools, data, infrastructure and machine learning.
• Recruit, develop and lead an engineering team built from the ground up.
• Architect cohesive systems spanning several software areas, and keep a working knowledge of the codebase so you can critique pivotal designs.
• Work alongside sales, operations, finance and production staff to turn real workflows into software.
• Raise the standard for reliability, security and observability, and measure how engineering work affects customers and operations.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• 4+ years of experience.
• A proven record of building and scaling systems from zero at a technology company, a high-growth startup or a large organization.
• A product-focused full-stack engineer with a backend lean, comfortable spending about 70% of time on hands-on engineering and 30% on team management.
• Daily, deep use of current AI tools such as Claude or Cursor in day-to-day work.
• A bachelor's degree in computer science or a STEM-related field from a top-25 school.
• Comfortable working with both software engineers and factory operators.
• Willingness to travel up to 20% of the time to customer and vendor sites. Bonus points
• Exposure to mathematical optimization, data-driven product development or running learning models live in production.
• Prior exposure to industrial or physical-world engineering is a plus.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: $225K - $300K
• Equity Location and work model
• Los Angeles, CA, United States
• On-site, 5 days in-office per week
• Full-time