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Head of Engineering
Valley · Full-time · In Person or Remote (US/EU time zones)
About Valley
Valley is an AI-native outbound sales platform. Our customers use us to generate personalized outreach, handle replies, and run sales development on autopilot. We’re a small distributed team shipping at AI-native speed against a large, growing market, backed by Antler, LAUNCH, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and General Catalyst (raised $3.3m) now generating between $2m and $5m ARR.
We’re at the stage where the product works, customers love it, and the next chapter is about building an engineering org that ships faster and at a higher quality than anyone else in the category. Our core problem is activation, clear user paths, UI/UX patterns, and complexity. We have a clear roadmap for new features and for simplifying the core of the product to meet user expectations. We need someone to fully own execution + eng code quality.
The Role
You run engineering and you ship. Both. This is not a role where you graduate out of the code and into meetings. The best engineers we’ve worked with are people who run teams without losing the edge that got them there – they review PRs critically, write code when it matters, talk to customers, hold the roadmap in their head, and drag the bar up by example.
You own execution, team quality, technical direction, shipping cadence, and how fast we move. You partner with our Head of Product and report to the CEO.
Who We’re Looking For
TLDR: A cracked engineer who wants to run a team and still ship like a maniac.
Specifically: someone who was the best engineer on their last team, who decided they wanted leverage over a team’s output, and who refuses to let the management title take them out of the work. You write code. You review PRs. You jump into the nastiest bugs yourself. You talk to customers directly because you don’t trust second-hand signal. You hold opinions on the roadmap because you’re the one shipping against it.
You move fast. You make decisions with conviction, often with incomplete information, and you correct course quickly when you’re wrong. You don’t call meetings to make calls that can be made in Slack. You don’t wait for consensus to act on things that are obvious. You are unreasonable about outcomes and that’s how you drive unreasonable outcomes.
You are AI-native. We build with Claude Code as the primary agentic tool, Cursor alongside, and continuous evaluation of what’s new. Our engineers ship meaningfully faster because of how they use these tools – not because they paste prompts, but because they understand scoping, context, review, and taste at a level that makes agentic coding an accelerant rather than a liability. You operate at this level already. If you haven’t shipped serious production work with agentic coding tools, this isn’t the right role.
You have taste. You know the difference between a feature that works and a feature that feels right. You care about animation, empty states, error states, and the small things that separate professional software from shipped-to-ship software. You hold your team to that standard and you show them what it looks like.
What You Do, Day to Day
- Write code. Review PRs. Be in the repo.
- Run standups, sprint planning, and 1:1s that produce real signal.
- Own how we sequence and ship work against the roadmap.
- Talk to customers directly. Often. Bring what you hear back into the team.
- Make technical calls – architecture, stack, debt, migrations – with conviction.
- Set and hold the bar on code quality, shipping speed, design taste, and AI tooling fluency.
- Partner with our Head of Product. He owns what we build. You own how we build it and whether we ship it.
- Hire, grow, and manage out.
What Success Looks Like
- 30 days: You’re in the code, running the team’s cadence, and the CEO has stopped being the person asking “is this shipping?”
- 90 days: Shipping velocity is visibly higher. A drifting technical call has been force-resolved. You and the Head of Product have a clean working rhythm. At least one feature shipped that you personally wrote meaningful code for.
- 12 months: The team is a competitive advantage. The CEO doesn’t look over your shoulder. Our engineering org is the one other founders ask us about.
Who You Are
- You’ve been a senior or staff engineer at a company known for shipping quality software.
- You’ve run an engineering team before, or you’ve been the de facto lead on one, and you know the job.
- You’ve worked at 10-30 person startups. You know what that version of engineering looks like.
- You’ve worked alongside a strong Head of Product or designer before and made that partnership work.
- You ship with agentic coding tools at depth.
- You are direct. You disagree, decide, and move. You don’t get defensive when challenged.
- You care about customers, not just technology.
Who You’re Not
- Someone looking to do this part-time or as an advisor.
- Someone who wants to graduate out of the code.
- Someone whose first move is to rewrite the stack.
- Someone who wants to own product strategy instead of partnering on it.
- Someone who waits for consensus.
Our Stack
TypeScript, Nx monorepo, Pothos GraphQL, Prisma, Next.js, BullMQ, Postgres, Stripe, Clerk, multi-provider LLM routing. AI coding: Claude Code (primary), Cursor, anything new that earns its place.
You don’t need to have shipped every piece. You need to read a stack like this and know what’s load-bearing.
Compensation
$200K to $230k/year with 2% equity (RSUs)
(HIGH equity for our stage – we want true ownership)
Process
- 45 min with the CEO.
- Written reflection on what you’d do in your first 30 days, based on artifacts we share.
- AI coding session. Ship a real feature end-to-end using agentic tooling, with us watching.
- Call with our Head of Product.
- Call with two engineers.
- References, offer, close.
Two weeks from first call to signed offer if we both want to.
To Apply
Email zayd@joinvalley.co with:
- LinkedIn or resume
- A paragraph on the last hard technical call you made and how you made it
- A paragraph on your current AI coding practice – what you use daily, what you’ve shipped with it, where it falls over
- A question you want answered before our first call
- No cover letters. Tell me why this is the job you want to do next.
