Head of Applications Engineering

Head of Applications Engineering

Location: Remote US
Reports to: CTO
Titles: We’re flexible on leveling between Head of Engineering and Director of Engineering, commensurate with scope and experience.

What’s the role

Estuary powers “right-time” data replication and transform: from sub-second CDC replication to terabyte-scale OLAP data flows. We’re formalizing a Platform (foundational services) vs Applications (SaaS and technology integrations, transformation UX, AI enablement) structure across our team and technology stack, by hiring a Head of Applications Engineering to lead strategy, people, delivery, and operations as we transition from a flat team of generalists to durable, high-ownership pods. This role is a peer to the Head of Platform Engineering (founder CTO as interim).

What you’ll do

• Optimize project delivery. Develop processes and team loops that wrangle the competing needs of customers, partners, marketing, operations, and long-term product vision into a focused and achievable technical pipeline.
   
• Maintain SLOs. Manage application issue triage and response so that customer impacts are evaluated and resolved expeditiously. Safeguard Estuary’s “fix bugs first” culture and protect our reputation for customer support and success as we grow.
   
• Manage and nurture. Establish Estuary’s engineering management culture. Develop and organize the existing Applications team (a mix of early career through decades of experience), hire to meet scaling project needs, and tap your experience to layer the right structures and processes at the right time.
   
• Partner tightly. Work with the co-founders and leads for compliance, marketing, sales, and support to develop our shared roadmap, refine scope into clear engineering commitments, set expectations, sequence work, and surface risks.
   
• Operational excellence. Develop and champion quality standards and strategies for risk minimization. Improve development processes and experience.
   
• Hiring engine.  Own the engineering candidate lifecycle: sourcing, screening, interview structure, scoring, and onboarding. Work with in-house recruiting to achieve sustainable growth of exceptional hires.
   
• Be a player‑coach.  You’ll read design proposals, ask the right questions, build prototypes, and contribute code occasionally to stay on top of Estuary’s technology stack—this is not a pure people‑ops role, but requires honed judgement for “do” vs “delegate”.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years in platform engineering with 3–5+ years leading teams; experience managing 8–20 engineers across 2–4 pods.
• Proven ability to lead, introduce structure, and nurture engineering excellence across multiple teams in a complex domain, preferably B2B.
• Evidence of hiring and leveling senior ICs and tech leads; manager‑of‑managers experience a plus.
• Ability to communicate at all levels, and discuss nuanced technical concepts with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading and organizing incident response in high stakes settings.
• Familiarity and interest in techniques for building data-intensive applications and platforms.

How we work

• High autonomy; engineers own the full feature lifecycle and often engage directly with users.
• Remote‑first, Slack‑centric, async‑friendly with VCs as needed
• Global team with a skew towards east-coast working hours

Compensation & leveling

Market‑competitive cash + equity.