Head of Engineering

Job description

THE ROLE We are looking for an experienced AI native Head of Engineering for Redpine. This is a builder's role first and foremost. You will lead, but you will also be deep in the code, shaping the architecture and shipping alongside the team. You will own the how of engineering at Redpine end to end: the team, the systems, and the pace at which we ship. You report directly to our CPTO and co-founder. WHAT YOU'LL DO The team - Build a culture and a team where strong engineers do their best work: clear ownership, low ceremony, high trust. - Coach engineers, and create the conditions for them to lead. - Inspire new ways of working and ensure that they get adopted without degrading speed. Technical direction - Own the architecture across the platform: data pipelines, retrieval and reranking, the knowledge graph, and the API, MCP, and CLI that agents use. - Recommend the build, buy, and bet calls together with the CPTO, guided by the product strategy, and keep the system simple as it grows. - Stay accountable for reliability, latency, and cost, the things customers actually feel. Delivery and pace - Set how the team plans, prioritizes, and ships, and keep cycle time short. - Remove blockers before they spread, and decide quickly when a decision is reversible. - Hold a high quality bar without turning the process into a tax. - Always ask how the team can be faster but still deliver quality software. Staying at the frontier - Track the research and the model releases that matter to Redpine, and read them closely enough to hold a real view. - Separate the results that change how we should build from the ones that are noise. - Bring the useful ones back to the team in a way that makes people faster, not anxious. Adoption before admiration. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - You have led engineering teams and been accountable for what they shipped. This is a hard requirement, not a nice to have. - You have done this at a startup that scaled, ideally one we would recognize, and you can speak to what broke as it grew and what you did about it. - You stay close to the frontier by choice. You read the AI model cards and the papers, and you can say which new capability changes our plan and which does not. - You are still technical enough to earn the team's trust. You can write and review code, and be useful at it. - You make hard ideas land. You can take a dense result and explain, to an engineer and to a non engineer, why it matters and what we do about it. - You favor small, clear systems, and you question whether a thing needs to be built before you build it. - Nice to have: built in a regulated or data heavy domain (health, science, legal, or finance). Hands on experience with retrieval, RAG, knowledge graphs, agents, or large scale data infrastructure. Took a team through a real scaling step. A public footprint you can point to: open source, writing, talks, or research. WHY THIS ROLE Redpine sits in a category that moves every week. The data layer for agents is being defined right now, and the model capabilities underneath it change faster than most teams can absorb. We cannot stand still, and we cannot chase every new result either. We need an engineering leader who can tell the difference, keep a growing team focused, and make sure the right new ideas reach the codebase before our competitors ship them. The job is to stay calm while shipping fast. PRACTICAL DETAILS - Based at Redpine HQ in central Stockholm. Office-first, with real autonomy for deep-work days and life admin. - Requires a valid Swedish work permit or similar eligibility. Relocation support available. - Competitive salary and meaningful equity. - Small team, high ownership. The same people design, ship, and run the systems. ABOUT REDPINE If models were the first wave of AI, and compute the second, we are building the data layer that comes next. Only a small fraction of the world's data is on the open internet. The rest, high-quality, domain-specific, often critical, sits behind paywalls, in databases, or with rights holders. Redpine is building the infrastructure to unlock it. We provide AI builders and autonomous agents with access to licensed, high-quality, multimodal data through a unified platform and API. The goal is simple: make AI systems more accurate, more useful, and grounded in real-world information. You will work closely with the founding team, including Anders (ex-partner at VC, McKinsey) and David (ex-tech and product leader at Spotify, Zettle, and Lunar). We are backed by Nordic Ninja, Node VC, and Luminar, alongside angels from OpenAI, Spotify, and Perplexity. If you are eager to make a meaningful impact in the AI space, we would love to hear from you. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. If you are excited about this role but your experience does not align perfectly with every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway.