Director of Engineering
Prior Labs
Seniority
Director
Model
In-Office
Sector
Salary
Undisclosed
Contract
Full-Time
You will be the first dedicated engineering leader at Prior Labs, reporting to the CTO with a direct line to both founders. You will build and run the engineering organization as it grows substantially over the next 18 months. This is a hands-on operator role: managing engineers, building the hiring machine, setting standards, running compliance, and working closely with SAP partners.
What you'll do
- Directly manage and grow the engineering team, including building out its management layer.
- Build the hiring machine: run hiring operations across hiring managers, design interview loops, and maintain a very high bar while the team grows.
- Own engineering standards and velocity: how the team reviews, tests, and ships - and how it gets leverage from AI coding tools.
- Own the security and compliance program - SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001 - right-sized so the lab keeps its speed.
- Own the engineering side of collaboration with SAP.
- Treat the deployment layer as a product surface: models reach customers through a managed API, customer VPCs, and self-hosted open weights.
- Act as a sparring partner to founders on org design and engineering direction.
What you'll need
- You have directly led an engineering organization of 10+ people, including through managers or leads.
- You have owned platform or infrastructure scope at scale: serving, APIs, availability, cloud and vendor budgets.
- You have operated under SOC 2 / ISO-style audit regimes.
- You have worked in both startups and large organizations - you can create structure from scratch and hold your own with a very large partner.
Nice to have
- You scaled an engineering org through a real growth phase (25 to 60+ or similar), building the management layer along the way.
- You have led engineering through an acquisition, working directly with the parent company.
- You have led engineering in a research- or ML-heavy organization and know how research code and production code differ.
- You have personally changed how your team works because of AI coding tools.