Nivalto · 16 hours ago
Founding Head of Engineering — AI, Agents & Infrastructure (Nivalto • Stealth)
United States
Full-time
Remote
Director/Executive
$275K/yr - $325K/yr
10+ years expNivalto is developing critical infrastructure for the emerging AI agent economy, a significant market opportunity by 2030. They are seeking a Founding Head of Engineering to lead the architecture and implementation of their governance and transaction control platform for regulated environments, establishing engineering discipline and delivering core systems.
Financial Services
Responsibilities
Architecture & execution: translate specs into real services/APIs; make ruthless scope tradeoffs while preserving core guarantees
Security, evidence, audit posture: threat model, key strategy, verifier approach, incident playbooks; ensure outputs are tamper-evident, exportable, and independently verifiable
Engineering leadership: establish high-standard engineering culture; own vendor/tool choices; build the early team and hiring pipeline
Customer/partner readiness: support technical diligence, publish realistic integration guidance, and align roadmap to buyer pain—not novelty
Qualification
Required
10+ years building and leading software systems; prior early-stage / founding engineering leadership
Proven ability to impose engineering discipline on fast-moving builds (especially with vendors)
BS in relevant engineering discipline (minimum)
Strong backend/platform skills (APIs, distributed systems basics, reliability patterns)
Security-minded implementation skills: signing/verifying, key management concepts, audit trails, tamper-evident logging
Proven 0→1 to 1→N product leadership: from whiteboard → PRD → shipped platform used by enterprises
Depth in governance, identity/authorization, or policy systems (e.g., PKI/mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, Zero Trust; policy-as-code such as OPA/Rego or equivalent)
Fluency with cloud & distributed systems (multi-tenant control planes, Kubernetes-era delivery, observability, SLOs)
Strong standards or ecosystem chops (writing specs, running interop, aligning vendors/customers)
Exceptional writing & communication—clear specifications, design docs, and external-facing briefs
Ability to design systems that auditors, admins, and compliance teams can actually use (not just “logs in JSON”)
Gateways/proxies, policy engines, authorization systems, compliance logging, evidence pipelines
Payments orchestration or high-integrity transaction systems (state machines, idempotency, reconciliation)
Regulated domains (banking, healthcare, insurance, trading, supply chain)
Experience building admin tooling and operational consoles
MLOps experience for edge deployments (model rollout, monitoring, governance, rollback)
Products touching routing, service mesh, SDN, or network security, or AI orchestration in regulated settings
Participation in IETF/CNCF/W3C/OpenTelemetry/SPIFFE/SPIRE or similar bodies
Built conformance programs, certification/badging, or marketplace-style verification
Preferred
MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field (preferred)
Security + platform engineering leader (identity, authZ, gateways)
Payments infrastructure engineering leader (orchestration, treasury, risk controls)
“Fixer” engineering leader who stabilized vendor-built systems and scaled them
Potential prior employers (not required): Stripe, Adyen, Modern Treasury, Cloudflare, Okta, AWS, GCP, Microsoft, Plaid, Rippling, Snowflake, Palantir, Databricks (or similar “systems + compliance + scale” environments)
Benefits
Equity Range: 3.0%–3.5% total at full-time conversion (4-year vest, 1-year cliff; milestone top-ups)
20–25% Performance Bonus
Company
Nivalto
Nivalto is building the future of wealth, legacy, and family office management through AURA — a next-generation AI operating system designed for ultra-high-net-worth families and advisors.
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase