Lazo - Head of Engineering
About Lazo
Lazo is the AI-powered operating system for modern startups—automating finance, tax, legal, payroll, and fundraising workflows so founders can scale faster. We're backed by AlleyCorp, AWS Startups, Google for Startups, Endeavor, and Tampa Bay Wave. Learn more at lazo.us.
The Role
We're uniting strategic technology leadership with hands-on execution to scale our multi-agent AI platform from 0→1→N. You'll shape the technical vision at the leadership table and roll up your sleeves to ship code, harden reliability, and build the engineering muscle that powers Lazo.
Expect a healthy mix of strategy, architecture, and coding. You'll set direction, make trade-offs explicit, and still own meaningful PRs until the team scales.
Responsibilities
1. Tech Strategy & Architecture
Own the technology strategy & roadmap aligned with business and product OKRs.
Define the reference architecture for agentic systems (LLMs, tool orchestration, data plane, safety/guardrails, evals).
Establish security & compliance baselines (IAM, secrets, data privacy; SOC2-readiness) and cost governance (FinOps).
Present trade-offs, risks, and progress in Leadership reviews (weekly/MBR/QBR).
2. Hands-on Engineering & Delivery
Ship backend services in Python/TypeScript; drive high-impact PRs and code reviews.
Orchestrate agents and toolchains (e.g., ADK, BeeAI, n8n or similar), integrate external APIs/DBs, and build robust pipelines.
End-to-end DevOps: AWS/GCP, containerization, IaC (Terraform/CDK), CI/CD, observability (logs/metrics/traces), and on-call design.
Reduce tech debt, improve latency/throughput, and manage infra cost per workflow/client.
3. Reliability, Security & Data
Define SLOs and error budgets; reduce MTTR and change-fail rate (DORA/SRE).
Implement data access policies, PII protection, and secure data flows for AI features.
Drive post-mortems and preventive engineering (runbooks, playbooks, chaos drills where appropriate).
4. Team Building & Culture
Act as a player-coach: hire, mentor, and level up engineers; install rituals of quality and focused execution.
Set clear scorecards (DORA, SRE, lead time, review SLAs) integrated with our operating system (Monday + GSheets).
Foster a culture of thoughtful trade-offs, fast feedback loops, and writing things down.
5. Cross-Functional & Stakeholder Management
Partner with Product & AI to turn customer problems into scalable solutions.
Collaborate with Ops, Growth, and Customer teams to ensure reliability, supportability, and launch readiness.
Manage key vendors/partners and evaluate build-vs-buy decisions with crisp ROI narratives.
What Success Looks Like
DORA: deployment frequency ↑, lead time ↓, change fail rate ↓, MTTR ↓.
Reliability: SLOs met, healthy error budgets, predictable incident management.
AI Quality: reproducible evaluations, task success rates up, safe/traceable tool use.
Cost & Scale: infra cost per client/workflow trending down with usage up.
Team: time-to-productivity for new hires, strong review SLAs, high engagement/eNPS.
Your First 90 Days
Day 30
Current-state architecture, risks, and cost/security posture mapped.
First meaningful PR to production + "golden path" for contributions.
On-call design and hiring plan drafted.
Day 60
Tech roadmap v1 with quarterly milestones and cost targets.
Hardened CI/CD, improved test coverage, and change-fail rate trending down.
1–2 automated agentic workflows running in production with basic evals.
Day 90
SLOs defined (e.g., 99.9% core uptime) with dashboards; MTTR < 60 minutes for P1s.
Tech-debt backlog prioritized with clear pay-down plan; 1–2 key hires signed.
Qualifications
Must-haves
6–8+ years building and scaling software in high-growth environments; 3+ years leading teams as Head/Lead/VP-level or equivalent scope.
Strong backend in Python and/or TypeScript, containers (Docker), and cloud (AWS or GCP) with IaC and CI/CD.
Hands-on experience with LLMs/agentic systems and tool orchestration; solid grasp of data flows and AI safety/guardrails.
Observability & security fluency (OpenTelemetry or similar; IAM, secrets, hardening).
Data-driven decision-maker with excellent communication; professional English.
Nice to have
FinOps, SRE, and SOC 2/compliance experience.
Domain exposure to finance/accounting/tax/payroll or other back-office systems.
Open-source contributions; RAG/evaluations experience.
Spanish; experience with distributed teams across time zones.
Our Evolving Stack
Python/TypeScript · AWS/GCP · Docker · IaC (Terraform/CDK) · Postgres/OLAP · CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar) · Observability (OpenTelemetry + stack) · Agent orchestration (ADK/BeeAI/n8n or similar) · Feature flags · Secrets management · Security scanners
How We Work
Weekly Leadership review for priorities and decisions; MBR/QBR for strategy & outcomes.
Scorecards in Google Sheets + Monday; focus on outcomes over output; PRDs and design docs over meetings.