Varick Agents — Head of Engineering

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA (Financial District, 5 days in-person) Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: None Available Reports to: Not specified in source

About Varick Agents

Varick Agents builds bespoke AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside Fortune 5000 companies. The full platform, including implementation, deploys directly into each client's environment — Varick's multi-tenant cloud, a dedicated instance, the client's VPC, on-prem, or fully air-gapped. Every client deployment compounds the product, and the company is scaling from 1:1 client engagements to 1:many, with an in-flight multi-cloud migration across AWS, GCP, and Azure and a 24/7 support commitment.

Founded: 2026 | Team size: 11–50 (Seed) | Total funding: Not specified Industry: AI Tools Website: varickagents.com Office: San Francisco, CA (Financial District)

Why Candidates Should Join

• Founding-team scope: Own the entire technical vision with a direct path to CTO.
• Platform, not features: Build the core platform every client deployment compounds — not a single feature inside a larger org.
• Immediate, measurable impact: 100% deployment rate into Fortune 5000 environments, with direct access to enterprise decision-makers.
• Compounding leverage: Systems that improve with every customer.

Intake Call Summary

Not available in source — the role page includes an intake video but no transcript or written summary.

The Role

The Head of Engineering (referred to as "Engineering Lead" in the company writeup) runs Varick's engineering, leading the core platform team and the teams that deliver client implementations. The role partners with product owners to run multiple engagements simultaneously and owns the technical direction that determines whether Varick becomes a generational platform or remains a services business. Stays hands-on enough to make the hard calls and jump in where it counts as the company scales from 1:1 to 1:many. Direct path to CTO.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the core platform team and multiple client-implementation teams, owning the seam between the platform and the implementations, and partner with product owners to run several engagements at once
• Recruit, mentor, and grow engineers and future leads; set code review and reliability standards; build an org that scales from 5 to 50
• Set the architecture and technical bar across the platform and every implementation, make build-vs-buy calls, and translate developments in agent frameworks, tool use, and long-context reasoning into production
• Guide the teams building compound agent systems — multi-step orchestration, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation suites, and confidence-gated human-in-the-loop — running inside enterprise ERP and CRM software
• Own the multi-client fleet and infrastructure: per-client configuration and isolation across shared-cloud, dedicated, VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped deployments; fleet-wide upgrade and rollback; monitoring, alerting, and on-call; plus Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, and Azure

Tech stack: AI agent frameworks (orchestration, tool use, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, human-in-the-loop); multi-tenant backend systems; enterprise integration (APIs, OAuth, connectors, ERP/CRM); Kubernetes; infrastructure-as-code; multi-cloud across AWS, GCP, Azure.

Requirements

• Top AI lab or founding eng at AI startup pedigree
• Production AI/ML systems: inference, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring
• 6+ years engineering with 2+ years staff, principal, or founding
• High agency, ownership mentality
• SF Financial District, 5 days in-person

Green Flags

• Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup, comfortable with founding-team scope rather than a single feature inside a larger org
• Track record of taking full ownership of outcomes across a system, not just their own code
• High agency, moves without waiting for requirements documents or explicit permission
• Comfortable talking directly to business decision-makers such as CFOs, COOs, and ops leads rather than working through layers of product management
• Evaluation and reliability discipline, building eval suites, confidence thresholds, and fail-closed behavior rather than shipping demos

Red Flags

• Background limited to prompt demos or research-style AI work without production, evaluation, or fail-closed system experience
• Tendency toward analysis paralysis or over-indexing on process before shipping
• Needs detailed requirements documents or explicit permission before acting
• Pure staff IC background inside a large (200+ person) engineering org without leadership or delivery ownership
• No experience operating software in production for enterprise clients, with no monitoring, on-call, or incident response background

Must-Have / Nice-to-Have (company writeup)

Preserved from the role body. The Requirements / Green Flags / Red Flags above (Contrario sidebar cards) are the scoring standard and take priority.

Must-Have

• 6+ years of software engineering, including real-time experience leading engineers as a lead, manager, or founding engineer accountable for a team's output
• Proven engineering leadership — built, grown, and mentored engineering teams and owned delivery across multiple teams or workstreams at once
• Deep experience building and shipping AI agents in production — orchestration, tool use, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop, not just prompt demos
• Strong distributed-systems instincts — multi-tenant backend systems, data modeling, and enterprise integration (real APIs, OAuth, connectors, enterprise ERP and CRM software)
• Comfortable owning infrastructure (Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, multi-cloud) and operating software across many deployments and versions — release management, staged rollout, rollback, monitoring, alerting, and on-call

Nice-to-Have

• Forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering experience, talking directly to the people whose process is being automated
• Background in process mining, workflow automation, or enterprise process discovery
• Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup
• Experience operating in enterprise environments with real security, compliance, and reliability requirements (SOC 2, audit, on-call/incident response), or published research/open-source contributions in agents and applied AI

Role Details

• Salary — $200,000–$300,000
• Equity — 0%–3%
• On-site policy — 5 days in-person, SF Financial District
• Visa sponsorship — None Available
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — San Francisco, CA

Screening Questions

None provided in source.

Contrario submission-form questions (Required Candidate Q&A): Basic Information, LinkedIn, Experience, Github, Current Company, Current Title, Logistics, Location, plus two explicit questions — "Do you need sponsorship now or in the future?" and "Are you open to relocating to the Bay Area?" The last two are role-specific submission questions to capture in outreach.

Interview Process

Stage names only in source; no durations or descriptions provided. Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Vibe Check Stage 3 — First Round Stage 4 — Second Round Stage 5 — On Site Stage 6 — Offer Stage 7 — Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.