Head of Engineering

About the role

Reflex is hiring a Head of Engineering to own the technical strategy, delivery execution, and operational maturity required to scale our platform for the next stage of growth. This is a foundational builder role, not a caretaker position. You will partner directly with the Founder/CEO, and lead an existing engineering team of approximately 5-8 engineers. There is no CTO layer today, as such this is a high-visibility role, including Board/Investor exposure. What You Will Build Your mandate is to architect and implement a resilient foundation of systems and processes that allows Reflex to scale and carry us into our next stage of growth. You will be responsible for: People & organizational leadership: Build and Lead the Team: Manage, mentor, and develop a team of five engineers. Conduct regular 1:1s, provide meaningful feedback, and create growth paths that retain top talent. Establish Engineering Culture: Define and model engineering best practices, code review standards, and technical decision-making frameworks that scale as we grow. Drive Technical Hiring: Partner with leadership to recruit exceptional engineers, from writing job descriptions to conducting technical interviews to closing candidates. Strategic Technical Partnership: Collaborate with the Technical Lead to navigate the complexities of a two-sided marketplace, including real-time dispatching, matching algorithms, and high-concurrency data processing. Refine the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC): Partner with Product to optimize how features are defined, scoped, tracked, and delivered to ensure high velocity without burnout. Technical leadership: Engineering Excellence & Standards: In collaboration with the technical lead, define and enforce the standards for code quality, documentation, and system reliability. You own the accountability for the team's adherence to these best practices. Operational Oversight: Lead the strategy for DevOps and infrastructure (CI/CD, cloud spend, security compliance), ensuring the foundation is stable enough for the team to ship rapidly and safely. System Health & Risk Management: Own the technical debt backlog and incident response protocols. Pragmatic Hands-on Contribution: Contribute to feature implementation and code reviews alongside the team. How You Will Work This role requires hands-on ownership and fast, high-quality decision-making. You should expect to: Personally ensure the stability of the system through sound technical decision making Work daily with exec team & engineering on priorities, tradeoffs, and technical direction Move quickly while maintaining a high bar for quality and leverage Why This Role Matters Now Reflex has validated its model and is scaling rapidly. At the same time, marketplace complexity is increasing. Decisions made in the next product strategy phase will determine whether Reflex compounds its advantage or accumulates long-term friction. This role exists to take the engineering team to the next step in operational maturity and technical excellence, transforming a high-growth group of builders into a disciplined, scalable organization ready to tackle the next frontier of innovation. What Success Looks Like (12-18 Months) You have built a predictable delivery engine where the CEO and stakeholders have full confidence in roadmap timelines and the trade-offs required to meet them. You have implemented clear career paths and a culture of cont