Head of Engineering

Infilla is making permitting unremarkable. The US is short 4–7 million homes, and the permit process is among the slowest parts of building them. We spent thousands of hours with hundreds of staff and applicants across 50+ municipalities before a line of code was written. We're building toward an agentic system that fundamentally changes how local government works, starting with permitting.

We've raised $5M from top-tier investors, we're profitable, and we have more customer demand than we can keep up with. Our customers include San Francisco, New York City, Sonoma County, and the State of Delaware.

We have product-market fit and a team of distributed senior/staff engineers (all working PST timezone), but no one owns engineering execution end-to-end. Sales and NRR are accelerating rapidly, and engineering needs to match.

We've built Infilla as an AI-native engineering org: a lean team using aggressive AI leverage to out-ship bigger competitors. It's a fundamentally different operating model, and it needs a player-coach to run it.

The founder brings deep domain expertise in permitting and government with hundreds of hours of field research. You'll bring the technical and engineering leadership. Together, you'll shape Infilla's future.

For the right person who earns it, this role has a path to a true technical co-founder partnership over time — but it starts with owning engineering execution and building that trust through what you ship.

• Technical partner to CEO. This role works closely with the CEO on critical decisions with lasting impact on the company's success.

• Real-world impact. The code your team ships goes into city and state governments and directly translates into homes getting built in real communities.

• A durable business, not a hype cycle. We're profitable with zero customer churn and contracts that double or expand every year.

• Freedom to use whatever solves the problem. LLMs, voice AI, computer vision, workflow engines, state machines — whatever fits. Local government has never had an agentic operating system, and you'll figure out what it should look like.

• Shape the team and culture early. You define what "good engineering" looks like for an AI-native team, in deep partnership with a founder who understands that the team you build is the company you build.

• Own what ships, how fast, and how reliably. End-to-end accountability for engineering output, on timelines we stand behind. As a player-coach, you stay close enough to the code and the team.

• Align technical decisions with business goals. Make architectural calls that builds and protects our competitive moat: user experience, data modeling, and data centricity.

• Make the hard calls the company needs. Cut scope, hold a high bar, and optimize for what Infilla needs to win.

• Get real velocity from AI tools. Every engineer has access to whatever they need. Your job is making that access pay off in what ships. No AI slop.

• Build the operating system for engineering. Code review, on-call, incident response, security. The basics exist. You make them good.

• Hire the right engineers. Raise the hiring bar and grow the team. You own both the bar and the team's size given business and technical needs.

Engineering is not a bottleneck to the business’s growth and is a competitive advantage. This means:

• Engineering is shipping fast, not fighting tools or process

• Delivery is predictable: we can commit to customer timelines and hit them

• There isn’t a tradeoff between speed and quality of what gets shipped

• We've shipped capabilities no government software company has shipped before

• Ideas > Hierarchy — Best idea wins. Be intellectually honest.

• Progress > Perfection — Get it working now, make it pretty later.

• Courage > Comfort — Do the right thing, even when hard.

• Kind > Nice — Share clear, helpful feedback often. Voice concerns. Listen.

Must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco to work closely with the founder. You must have authorization to work in the US without visa sponsorship.

• Has hired and led a distributed engineering team of 5+ at an early-stage B2B startup (Seed to Series B)

• You're more in the code than out of it. If you haven't shipped production code in the last 6 months, this probably isn't your role.

• Strong fluency with data modeling and production data systems. Permitting is fundamentally a data problem and our moat depends on getting this layer right.

• Hands-on fluency across the stack: React, Node, Postgres, AWS, Terraform or a track record of getting fluent in a new stack fast.

• Has worked directly with external stakeholders and customers as a technical representative.

GovTech or regulated-industry experience useful, but not required. Former founders welcome.

Research shows women and minorities are more likely to self-select out when they don't meet every requirement. We hire for strengths and potential, not a perfect resume fit.

We target a 2-week process end-to-end.

1. Intro Call (45 min) — Share your experience, what draws you to Infilla, and how you think about leading engineering at this stage.

2. Leadership + Business Sense (60 min) — Share how you think about hiring, firing, people management, and how technical decisions have affected business outcomes.

3. Technical Deep Dive (75 min) — Share a past system you've built with 2 engineers.

4. Whiteboard Exercise (60 min) - Collaborate on a real Infilla challenge with 2 engineers

5. Team day in SF (1 hour lunch + 3 hours at the office) — Meet different members of the team across Engineering, Product, Design, and Operations.

6. Reference checks & advisor call — An optional paid working sprint can be done to get to know the team.

7. Offer 🎉

Let's get more housing built. 🏡