Head of Engineering
ABOUT THE ROLE Location: Remote in US or Canada At Jona, we’re transforming how clinicians and consumers understand and optimize their gut microbiome. Our AI-powered platform decodes complex microbiome data and translates it into actionable insights—supporting better outcomes, stronger immunity, and longer health spans. We’re looking for a player-coach, hands-on Head of Engineering to help us scale our core product. You’ll lead a small, high-performing team while staying close to the code—shipping features, shaping architecture, and bringing AI-powered capabilities into production. This is a high-impact role: you’ll influence product direction, define how we build, and help turn ideas into real, user-facing systems fast. ROLE OUTLINE Experience going from 0 to 1: Own projects end-to-end, from ideation to delivery Architect systems: Design scalable backends, frontends, and AI-powered applications Build AI into the product: Integrate and operationalize ML models into various aspects of our product stack Establish MLOps foundations: Drive infrastructure for Model training, deployment and monitoring Collaborate tightly: Work directly with product, design, and data to move fast Raise the bar: Improve code quality, CI/CD, developer experience, and reliability Manage and mentor: Build, support, unblock, and grow a small team of engineers Culture: Nurture a high-performance and agile engineering culture WHAT YOU’LL BRING 10+ years of software development experience 3+ years of building and shipping modern AI-enabled web applications or platforms in production Experience leading small engineering teams and mentoring engineers while remaining highly hands-on Strong full-stack skills (TypeScript, React, Node.js) Experience designing scalable APIs and working with production databases, especially PostgreSQL and other SQL systems Experience with Docker/containers Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience Solid experience with AWS and owning cloud/platform maturity 3+ years of experience deploying and operating ML/AI systems in production Strong familiarity with MLOps practices, including model lifecycle management, monitoring, deployment, and data/model pipelines Comfortable owning ambiguous problems and moving quickly Strong product instincts—you care about what gets built, not just how Exposure to regulated environments (e.g., healthcare/HIPAA) PREFERENCES Experience in health-tech and can communicate well with science/clinical stakeholders Experience in healthcare or a regulated data background is preferred Experience interviewing and helping hire strong engineers is preferred; experience building a small team is a plus Experience with Kubernetes Familiarity with NoSQL/vector/search stores is a plus WHY JOIN JONA Own meaningful problems: Your work will directly shape the product and user experience Build with AI at the core: Not a side project—this is central to what we do Small team, big impact: Your decisions matter immediately Move fast: Minimal bureaucracy, high trust, real ownership Full Benefits: Medical, Dental & Vision: Competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents. This includes medical, dental, and vision premiums as well as a company contributed HSA/FSA. Retirement Matching: Jona has a 401k plan that offers company matching for dollars you contribute. Jona’s vacation policy is to take vacation. We operate on a Freedom and Responsibility model of unlimited PTO. Equity: We offer meaningful equity ownership, allowing team members to share directly in the long-term success of Jona. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: $225-270K Equity