Director, Head of Engineering

About Jetson

Jetson is an AI operating system for industrial environments.

Factories and warehouses are mission-critical, exception-driven environments. Every day, teams are forced to make real-time tradeoffs across labor, production, and materials to hit output and cost targets. Today, these decisions are coordinated manually, using spreadsheets, radio calls, and human intuition, on top of fragmented systems like ERP, HR, and MES that record what happened, but don’t help teams adjust when conditions change.

As a result, a small group of experienced operators effectively runs the operation by hand: sequencing production, deploying labor, reacting to downtime, managing materials, and controlling cost in real time. These workflows and the decisions behind them drive a disproportionate share of inefficiency across industrial operations.

At the same time, there’s a structural constraint: the industry cannot scale experienced operators fast enough. The people who know how to run these environments are in short supply, and every operation depends on them.

In payments, Stripe built the system that coordinates the flow of money. In industrial operations, that coordination layer doesn’t exist, it still lives in spreadsheets and muscle memory. Jetson is building the missing layer.

We’re a small, high-velocity team (low single-digit millions in ARR, NYC-based, backed by Inspired Capital) at the early stages of defining this category.

About the role

Jetson is hiring a Head of Engineering to build and define what an AI-native operating system for the physical world looks like. We’re seeking a product-oriented technical builder who has earned product instincts by building things in an AI-first way.

This is a hands-on, product-minded role at the intersection of engineering, AI, and real-world operations. You’ll work directly with the CEO to take messy, ambiguous problems from the plant floor and turn them into simple, working systems that drive outcomes.

Your mandate is to rethink how core operational workflows should work when AI is native to the system. That means reimagining key workflows with AI at the center, designing systems that don’t just report on operations, but actively help run them, while turning human intuition and tribal knowledge into scalable, repeatable logic.

There is no PM layer today at Jetson. You’ll operate in tight loops, problem → solution → customer and are expected to form strong product opinions, not wait for specs. You’ll lead a small team of 3-5 engineers, scale it deliberately, and remain deeply in the code.

Why this is a hard problem with a Trillion Dollar Prize

• The coordination layer has never been systematized and most critical decisions are still powered by human judgment
• We operate on messy, fragmented data with conflicting, delayed signals across ERP, HRIS, MES, and spreadsheets
• We are encoding judgment that captures how experienced humans make tradeoffs under uncertainty
• We are defining how AI should work in high-stakes environments where decisions impact physical operations

What You’ll Do

• Build the AI Core of our Product
• Define the technical architecture for an AI-native system that moves beyond dashboards into decision-making and action
• Partner directly with the CEO to translate ambiguous operational problems into shipped product
• Own technical decisions across system design, data architecture, and integrations (ERP, HRIS, MES)
• Write production code regularly and stay close to the product and customer problems
• Design systems that work with messy, real-world data and hold up in high-stakes operational environments
• Lead and develop a small engineering team, raising the bar through hands-on contribution
• Improve team velocity through better tools, patterns, and technical judgment
• Stay close to our customers with a forward deployed mindset
• Raise the bar through code, judgment, and velocity

Core Traits We’re Looking For

• You are a builder first and you still ship code regularly
• 0→1 experience building products from scratch in ambiguous, fast-moving startups (Seed - Series B)
• You actively use leading AI tools and have experience building with LLM-powered systems
• High ownership and urgency - you move fast and drive problems through to completion
• Strong product instincts - you focus on outcomes, simplify aggressively, and push back when needed
• Technical leadership through doing (i.e., you raise the bar and make other engineers more effective)
• Experience building for complex, real-world workflows is a plus
• Comfortable operating without structure, clear specs, or established playbooks
• You have high ownership and urgency on the important stuff

Why You Should Take This Job

• You want to build and ship vs. just manage
• You embrace and love the messiness of early stage startup environments
• Direct ownership over product and technical direction with real customer impact
• You like talking to customers
• Opportunity to define what AI-native looks like in a new category
• Massive problem space with a clean and proven entry wedge

Why You Shouldn’t Take This Job

• You want to manage a large team
• You expect clean specs or a PM layer
• You don’t like talking to customers
• You haven’t written production code recently
• You think of AI as a feature, not a system
• You prefer polished consumer products over messy real-world systems

Compensation \& Benefits

💰 Base Salary: $200K - $270K

💸 Senior Executive Equity in Jetson

🩺 100% healthcare coverage (Medical, Dental \& Vision)

🌴 Flexible PTO \+ 9 paid US Company Holidays

🎉 Team Events \+ Destination off-sites

Jetson strives to be fair and competitive. We leverage market data from Pave to inform our compensation packages. This range represents our broad compensation philosophy and covers various responsibility and experience levels.