Director of Engineering

The role

You will be our first dedicated engineering leader, reporting to the CTO with a direct line to both founders - no layers in between.

Today, engineering at Prior Labs is a small, very senior team. We plan to grow it substantially over the next 18 months, and your job is to build and run that organization.

We want to be honest about what this job is. It is a hands-on operator role: managing engineers, building the hiring machine, setting standards, running compliance, and working closely with our partners at SAP. If you light up at making an organization fast rather than at owning the biggest possible headcount, this is your role.

• Directly manage and grow the engineering team, including building out its management layer.

• Build the hiring machine: run hiring operations across our hiring managers, design interview loops that hold up in the AI era, and keep a very high bar while the team grows.

• Own engineering standards and velocity: how we review, test, and ship - and how the team gets real leverage from AI coding tools.

• Own our security and compliance program - SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001 - right-sized, so the lab keeps its speed.

• Own the engineering side of our collaboration with SAP.

• Treat the deployment layer as a product surface: our models reach customers through a managed API, customer VPCs, and self-hosted open weights, and the engineering behind that needs customer empathy, not just platform craft.

• Act as a sparring partner to the founders on org design and engineering direction - we're hiring someone who will argue with us.
  

What we're looking for

• You have directly led an engineering organization of 10+ people, including through managers or leads, and you can talk concretely about how you built it.

• You have owned platform or infrastructure scope at scale: serving, APIs, availability, cloud and vendor budgets.

• You have worked in both startups and large organizations - you can create structure from scratch and hold your own with a very large partner.

• You scaled an engineering org through a real growth phase (25 to 60+ or similar), building the management layer along the way.

• You have led engineering in a research- or ML-heavy organization and know how research code and production code differ - and how to bridge them without slowing research down.