mazehq - Engineering Director
Requirements
• Technical credibility that engineers will respect: A strong engineering background with the ability to meaningfully engage in architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical decisions. You don't need to be the best coder in the room, but you need to be in the room for the right reasons. • Experience as the most senior technical leader of a small, high-output team: You've been a CTO, VP Engineering, or Head of Engineering at a startup — or a tech lead in a similarly fast-moving environment — where you were accountable for both technical outcomes and the people delivering them. You know what it looks like to lead 10–20 engineers, not just manage them. • Genuine people leadership, not just org design: A proven track record of performance management, career development, and growing engineers into leaders. You've had hard conversations, made difficult calls, and built cultures where high performance and high support coexist. • The hands-on instinct: You're drawn to being close to the work. You'd rather understand a problem by reading the code than by reading a status update. You see "staying technical" as a feature of your leadership style, not a tension with it. • Comfort with small-team operating models: Experience working in environments where teams are lean, fast, and expected to figure things out — not environments where scale compensates for speed. You know how to get a lot done with a little. • Strong hiring instincts: You've been deeply involved in engineering hiring — defining the bar, building processes, closing candidates — and you have strong opinions about what great looks like. • A business owner's mindset: You measure yourself by customer outcomes and revenue impact. You push your teams to understand why they're building what they're building, not just how. • Experience in cybersecurity, AI, or security tooling — or a genuine interest in the domain and willingness to go deep quickly. • Founder or early-stage startup experience, particularly having built an engineering org from a small base. • Familiarity with agentic AI systems, LLMs, or ML-adjacent engineering — not as a researcher, but as someone who's built or led teams building on top of these technologies. • Experience managing distributed teams.
Benefits
• Ambitious challenge: We're using generative AI — LLMs and agents — to solve some of the most pressing problems in cybersecurity today. The engineering challenges are genuinely hard, the domain matters, and we're early enough that the architectural decisions you make will define the platform for years. • Expert team: We are a team of hands-on leaders with experience at Big Tech and high-growth scale-ups, including teams behind multiple acquisitions and an IPO. We hire for quality over speed and it shows. • Impactful work: Cybersecurity is a force for good. The products your teams build directly help security teams protect their organisations against real attacks. The mission isn't decorative. • Build an AI-native engineering org from the ground up: We're designing the team structure, culture, and ways of working with a blank sheet of paper, in an era where agentic coding tools are changing what small teams can accomplish. You'll shape that from the start. • Real ownership and a clear growth path: You'll have genuine accountability over a meaningful portion of the organisation from day one, with a direct partnership with Santiago and significant equity upside as we scale.
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