Pioneer Square Labs · 20 hours ago
Head Of Engineering - AI Assisted Food & Bev Development (Zucca)
Seattle
Full-time
Hybrid
Director/ExecutiveZucca is a seed-funded AI platform in the food and beverage industry, aimed at streamlining product development processes. The Head of Engineering will lead the engineering function, focusing on execution, team building, and leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity and quality.
Enterprise SoftwareInternetMobile
Responsibilities
Lead Zucca’s engineering execution end-to-end: translate product priorities into a clear delivery plan, run a lightweight operating cadence, and ship predictably
Build and manage a small, high-performing engineering team (4–6 engineers near-term), including hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management
Stay hands-on: contribute directly to critical-path work, unblock engineers, and maintain high technical credibility through code reviews and targeted implementation
Increase velocity and quality of output by establishing pragmatic engineering operations: planning/reviews, release hygiene, incident response, and lightweight metrics (cycle time, deployment frequency, defects, reliability trends)
Instill AI tools as a core part of daily engineering practice to drive productivity and quality: establish norms for AI-assisted development (design, coding, testing, debugging, documentation), maintain guardrails for security and correctness, and continuously improve our workflows through lightweight experimentation and measurement
Partner closely with Zucca’s architectural lead to maintain architectural coherence as we scale—ensuring we balance speed and quality without accumulating invisible debt
Own sequencing and resourcing tradeoffs within engineering: make deliberate calls about tech debt, refactors, scalability work, and reliability investments based on business needs and risk
Collaborate cross-functionally, partnering with product, design, and business teams to define and prioritize work that matters—especially in the context of customer pilots
Build and maintain a highly secure application, incorporating best-practice security measures such as encryption, rigorous access controls, and secure coding standards
Qualification
Required
Proven track record in fast-paced, early-stage environments
Ability to ship quickly, think strategically, and own outcomes end-to-end
Experience as a player-coach who can balance execution and quality
Enjoyment in mentoring and building teams
Strong full-stack generalist, comfortable across modern frontend and backend systems
Ability to create high-velocity engineering environments without over-processing
Great communicator and natural problem solver
Experience building teams that use AI tools thoughtfully and consistently
Pragmatic, iterative mindset, delivering customer value quickly while planning for long-term scalability
Desire to be close to the customer, gathering and synthesizing feedback
Deep curiosity about AI-driven products and excitement to explore how AI can transform F&B product development
Preferred
Experience scaling an engineering team from early stage through the next phase (e.g., 3–5 engineers to 8–15+)
Experience with generative AI products, including evaluation/regression practices for AI behavior and quality
Background building data-intensive platforms or complex workflow products
Familiarity with security best practices for auditable and protected data environments
Benefits
100% paid health benefits for employee and 50% for family
401k
Company
Pioneer Square Labs
Pioneer Square Labs is a studio that creates and launches technology startups.
Founded in 2015
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$27.5MKey Investors
Foundry Group
2018-01-18Series B· $15M
2015-10-01Series A· $12.5M
2015-09-29Series A
Leadership Team
Greg Gottesman
Managing Director, Co-Founder
Palvi Mehta
Partner and CFO
Recent News
vcnewsdaily.com
2025-11-19
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