Technical Ex-Founder

This isn’t your typical Head of Engineering role. We’re looking for a seasoned veteran who leads from the front and thrives in high-velocity, high-ownership environments. Your mission: build the fastest engineering team on the planet.

Who you are: You’re a former founder / technical early-stage operator with proven leadership experience in fast-moving startups or scaleups. You’re comfortable making imperfect decisions quickly, you’ve built products under pressure, and you know that momentum beats perfection.

You might be:

• A seasoned engineer who has already stepped into an Eng Leader role at a venture-backed startup
• An ex-founder who knows how to ship when the runway is short and the stakes are high
• A pragmatic builder who values time-to-value over “the right way”

What makes you perfect for this role:

• Engineering leadership: You’ve coached and unblocked engineers in high-velocity, high-pressure environments.
• Deep technical expertise: You have strong architecture instincts and solid security knowledge, but you’ll cut through complexity to keep shipping.
• Startup DNA: You’ve shipped product in 0→1 or hyper-growth contexts where speed and ownership were survival skills.
• Velocity obsession: You believe iteration > perfection, and your instinct is always to get value in front of users as fast as possible.
• AI-first: You’re bullish on AI, vibe-coding daily, and always looking for ways to push velocity through AI-assisted workflows.
• DevX focus: You obsess over developer experience because you know great tooling = more speed.
• Execution focus: Monitoring, observability, and performance aren’t “nice to haves” — they’re how you ship fast without breaking trust.

What You’ll Do:

• Set the bar for engineering velocity - coaching, mentoring, and unblocking the team every day working closely with our CTO and co-founder
• Make architectural and security calls fast, balancing speed with long-term resilience
• Build and own best-in-class developer experience — tooling and workflows that eliminate drag
• Monitor and protect reliability and SLAs, while still moving at startup speed
• Partner tightly with product and design to deliver rapid, end-to-end iterations
• Establish a culture where iteration is celebrated and perfectionism is challenged

How We Work At Lightdash:

• We build in public. Open source means moving fast with shared context.
• We challenge problems, not people. No blame, just solutions.
• We’re highly collaborative. Independent, but we win as a team (and with our community).
• We bias hard toward impact. We’d rather ship the wrong thing quickly and learn, than waste weeks polishing what nobody needs.

Our tech stack:

• Primary: TypeScript, React, Node, SQL
• Frameworks: Express, React-hooks, Redux, RTK, Mantine
• Infrastructure: Docker, GCP, Kubernetes, Tracing, Prometheus

While familiarity with our stack is helpful, we value your ability to learn and adapt over specific technical experience.

We’re deliberately looking for ambitious leaders from startups and high-growth companies. If you want predictability, long roadmaps, and “the right way” over speed, this isn’t the role for you.

We believe that to build a product that works for a diverse group of people, we need a diverse team. So, we strongly encourage candidates of all different perspectives, experiences, backgrounds and identities to apply. We’re committed to hiring people regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age or disability. And once you join us, we’re committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best work of your career.