Head of Application Engineering

Grazen AI · Full-time · Fremont, CA · On-site

About Grazen AI

Grazen AI builds AI systems that work in the physical world. We are early, funded, live with paying customers, and deliberately quiet about the details in public. We will walk you through the product in the first conversation.

The role

You will lead engineering for everything our customers touch: the iOS and Android apps, the web consoles, and the platform services behind them. This is a player-coach role: you set technical direction, you lead a small team, and you still write code 30 to 50% of the time. You are accountable for what ships.

What you will do

• Own architecture, delivery, and quality for a camera-first mobile app (iOS and Android, phones and tablets) used by people on their feet in buildings with unreliable connectivity: capture, offline queueing, resumable background upload, guided task flows, notifications.
• Own the web consoles (React and TypeScript) used by customers and our internal operations team, and the SaaS platform behind them: multi-tenant data model, task and workflow engine, media ingestion and processing, real-time updates, reporting and export.
• Own integrations with third-party systems through REST APIs, webhooks, and OAuth, with idempotency, retries, and audit trails.
• Make tenant isolation, role-based access, and audit logging non-negotiable properties of the system, and prove them with tests.
• Set the engineering bar: code review, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, on-call, and incident review.
• Lead, hire, and mentor the engineering team, run technical design reviews, and unblock people.
• Work directly with the founder and product to turn ambiguous customer needs into scoped, sequenced technical plans, and ship weekly.

What we need

• 12+ years building and operating production software, including several years leading engineering teams as a director, head of engineering, or equivalent.
• You have shipped iOS and Android apps to real users and owned them after launch (React Native, Flutter, or native Swift and Kotlin).
• You have built and operated a web app or SaaS product: React and TypeScript on the front end, TypeScript/Node or Python services, PostgreSQL, queues and background jobs, cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS).
• Depth in at least one of: offline-first sync, camera and media pipelines on mobile, large-file upload under unreliable networks.
• A track record as technical lead: you have set direction for a team and can show what shipped because of it.
• Security-minded by habit: multi-tenancy, RBAC, secrets management, audit trails.
• Clear written communication and comfort in a largely asynchronous team spanning US and India time zones.
• Based in or willing to relocate to the Fremont area; this role is on-site.

Nice to have

• On-device ML inference (Core ML, TensorFlow Lite, ONNX) or integrating vision-model outputs into product flows.
• Barcode and QR scanning at scale; tablet-first UX.
• PDF and spreadsheet report generation; WebSockets; event-driven architectures.
• Early-stage experience as one of the first ten engineers at a company.

How we work

• Small team, direct access to the founder, and customers you will meet in your first weeks.
• Written design docs before large builds, a weekly shipping cadence, and a bias to fixing root causes.

Compensation

• Salary: $125,000 to $150,000.
• Equity: 0.5% to 2.0%.
• Health insurance: 100% of premiums paid by the company.

Process

• 30-minute intro call, a 3-hour on-site hands-on session, and a founder conversation.