Head of Engineering, Lightdash
More information about location
Agent BI platform for modern data teams
Posted today
Agent BI platform for modern data teams
21-100 employees
Posted today
More information about location
21-100 employees
Company mission
To use AI to build and manage analytics so teams can focus on strategy while the business gets trusted, self-serve insights.
Role
Who you are
- We want a deeply technical leader who still loves to build, leads from the front, and thrives in high-velocity, high-ownership environments
- You’re a top-tier engineer with proven leadership experience in fast-moving startups or scaleups
- You’re comfortable making imperfect decisions quickly, you’ve built products under pressure, and you know that momentum beats perfection
- Engineering leadership: You’ve coached and unblocked engineers in high-velocity, high-pressure environments
- Deep technical expertise: You have strong architecture instincts and solid security knowledge, but you’ll cut through complexity to keep shipping
- Startup operator mindset: You’ve taken products from 0→1 or through hyper-growth and know how to build systems that evolve with the company
- Velocity obsession: You believe iteration > perfection, and your instinct is always to get value in front of users as fast as possible
- AI-first: You’re bullish on AI, vibe-coding daily, and always looking for ways to push velocity through AI-assisted workflows
- DevX focus: You obsess over developer experience because you know great tooling = more speed
- Execution focus: Monitoring, observability, and performance aren’t “nice to haves”, they’re how you ship fast without breaking trust
- You might be:
- A seasoned engineer who has already stepped into an Head of Engineering / Engineering Manager role at a venture-backed startup
- An ex-founder who has built and shipped products under real pressure
- A startup tech lead who thrives on ownership and bold decisions
- A pragmatic builder who values time-to-value over “the right way”
What the job involves
- We’re seeking an exceptional Head of Engineering / Engineering Manager to partner closely with our CTO and lead the next stage of our engineering organisation
- Your mission: build the fastest engineering team on the planet
- Set the bar for engineering velocity: coaching, mentoring, and unblocking the team every day
- Make architectural and security calls fast, balancing speed with long-term resilience
- Build and own best-in-class developer experience - tooling and workflows that eliminate drag
- Monitor and protect reliability and SLAs, while still moving at startup speed
- Establish a culture where iteration is celebrated and perfectionism is challenged
- We build in public. Open source means moving fast with shared context
- We challenge problems, not people. No blame, just solutions
- We’re highly collaborative. Independent, but we win as a team (and with our community)
- We bias hard toward impact. We’d rather ship the wrong thing quickly and learn, than waste weeks polishing what nobody needs
- Our tech stack:
- Primary: TypeScript, React, Node, SQL
- Frameworks: Express, React-hooks, Redux, RTK, Mantine
- Infrastructure: Docker, GCP, Kubernetes, Tracing, Prometheus
- While familiarity with our stack is helpful, we value your ability to learn and adapt over specific technical experience
Application process
- Step 1. Screening call
- Step 2. Interview with CTO
- Step 3. Interview with CEO
- Step 4. Tech test and meet the team
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Lightdash was founded with the goal to help customers analyze their data by proposing relevant tests and thresholds to track, allowing users to customize queries by adding their own metrics. The platform currently supports most major data warehouses including Snowflake and BigQuery, with planms to keep broadening coverage.
Founders Hamzah Chaudhary and Oliver Laslett’s background as data scientists and software engineers gives them a significant advantage when developing a tool that aims to simplify the day-to-day for these types of employees. Lightdash tests the quality of the data directly from the customer’s data warehouse and reports any potential issue, allowing the client to visualize the results on a customised dashboard that requires no coding skills.
Crucially, Lightdash is open-source. That means it prioritizes integrations by default unlike Looker which, being owned by Google, has resulted in decreased interoperability with systems outside of GCP. On top of this, the company secured Series A funding in 2024, which is being used to roll out its AI Analyst product available on its cloud.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Oct 2024
$11m
SERIES A
Oct 2022
$6m
SEED
Total funding: $19.5m
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Hamzah Chaudhary
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding Lightdash in 2021, Hamzah was a Faculty Advisor at Founders Academy. They also spent 3 years at Cytora as a Data Engineer, Product Manager and Director of Product Management.
Oliver Laslett
(Co-Founder & CTO)Oliver previously worked at Stack More Layers as a Machine Learning Engineer. Prior to that, they spent nearly 4 years at Cytora as a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Scientist.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Lightdash
- We're lucky to have access to a large network of people in tech. We provide underrepresented employees with the resources and intros they need to connect with external mentors in their group to provide support and promote growth
- Being remote-first gives us the opportunity to "let folks have a life outside of work". We want that, and we understand that for certain groups of people, it's a requirement to be able to work from somewhere that isn't an office and have more flexible working hours.
- We ask ourselves regularly if we're doing enough in hiring a diverse team. Then, we ask ourselves if we're doing enough to promote diversity once someone is part of the team. We talk openly about what we're doing to promote diversity. We want our team to be able to question our efforts and talk about what we can do to improve.
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