About Us:

At Bolo AI, our mission is to use AI to make daily work faster, safer, and better for the heavy industry worker. We are building the next-generation agentic platform for heavy industries, starting with the Energy sector—enabling intelligent systems that reason, retrieve, and act across complex workflows spanning the field, office, and control center.

Role Overview:

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering who will own the end‑to‑end engineering strategy, architecture, and delivery of our agentic AI platform—the backbone that models, automates, and optimizes mission‑critical workflows for leading energy companies. Reporting to the CTO, you’ll define and execute our global engineering strategy. You will collaborate closely with the Head of Engineering, India—who manages the Bangalore hub—to scale high‑performance teams in both locations.

This is a rare opportunity to step into a senior leadership role with end-to-end ownership of our engineering execution in the U.S. You’ll work closely with the leadership to shape our platform, technical culture, and scaling plan—and for the right candidate, this role could grow into a VP-level leadership position as the company scales.

Note: This role is expected to be based in the Bay Area, with at least 3 days per week in our Palo Alto office.

What You’ll Own:

• Technical Vision & Architecture - Define and evolve the multi‑year architecture for LLM‑powered agents, real‑time data retrieval, and domain‑specific tooling, delivered across AWS/Azure cloud and enterprise VPCs.
• Agentic AI Platform - Design modular, memory-aware agent orchestration systems with long-context workflows, multi-agent communication, and human-in-the-loop interventions. Collaborate closely with Head of AI to align infra decisions with evolving LLM and multimodal capabilities.
• Product Execution - Translate product strategy into an actionable engineering roadmap; drive sprint planning, estimation, and on‑time delivery against aggressive milestones.
• Engineering Excellence – Establish best‑in‑class practices for observability, reliability, security, and performance; implement metrics and SLAs that hold the team accountable to world‑class standards.
• Team Building & Leadership – Hire, manage, and retain top talent across backend, infra, and applied‑ML disciplines; foster an inclusive, high‑ownership culture that rewards curiosity and results.
• Stakeholder Communication – Present architectural decisions, risk trade‑offs, and delivery status to executives, board members, and enterprise customers.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and oversee scalable, multi‑tenant backend systems that power reasoning, retrieval, and guided task execution for LLM agents.
• Design secure, extensible services and APIs that orchestrate agentic workflows, memory, and tool usage in real‑world industrial scenarios.
• Lead the build‑out of high‑availability infrastructure across public cloud and customer VPC deployments, ensuring compliance with enterprise security standards.
• Partner with Product, Design, and AI leadership to translate customer needs into scalable platform features.
• Establish OKRs and engineering KPIs; continuously improve throughput, quality, and developer productivity.
• Implement robust hiring processes and career frameworks; grow a diverse, globally distributed engineering team from X → Y over the next 12–18 months.
• Champion DevSecOps and CI/CD automation to accelerate release velocity while maintaining uncompromising reliability.
• Act as final escalation point for critical production issues, driving rapid root‑cause analysis and long‑term fixes.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of backend or infrastructure engineering experience; 2+ years in a staff/principal role
• 2+ years as a people manager, including working with global teams
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, service architecture, and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience designing secure, high-availability infrastructure for enterprise-grade applications; Strong engineering skills in Python and modern service frameworks (FastAPI, gRPC, etc.)
• Familiarity with LLM-powered systems, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool use, and multi-agent coordination
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

What We Offer:

Bolo AI is a technology startup headquartered in Palo Alto, backed by True Ventures, Benchstrength, Accomplice, J Ventures, and Beat Ventures. We offer competitive compensation, generous PTO, flexible working hours, an office in Palo Alto for collaboration with colleagues, and the following:

• Competitive Compensation: A strong base salary
• Ownership & Impact: Equity options so you can share in our success as we grow and shape the future together.
• Hybrid Work Environment: Enjoy a flexible hybrid schedule—collaborate in person and work from home.
• Growth & Opportunity: Join us at a pivotal stage where your contributions will have a direct impact on our journey. As we grow, so will your opportunities.
• Culture of Respect & Collaboration: We live by humility, respect, and low ego. You’ll be part of a team that values your ideas and celebrates wins together.