Head of Technology

Summary

Join Esteam, an AI-powered education platform focused on improving children's literacy, as their Head of Technology. You will lead the technical vision and build a proprietary speech recognition engine for kids. This is a stage-zero startup, offering the freedom to define the tech stack and build your team. You'll be responsible for all aspects of technology development, from defining requirements to managing the engineering team and ensuring compliance. Strategic planning with the CEO and fundraising from VCs are also key responsibilities. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in AI, ASR, and managing engineering teams in early-stage startups.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience with recent hands-on development and managing a small technical team of engineers (e.g., ML, ASR, full-stack, mobile) as a Technical Lead
• A proven track record of early-stage production AI development – defining a stage-zero product and bringing it to market
• Experience working with and/or developing automatic speech recognition technology
• Experience architecting self-provisioning, scalable software platforms that are fully instrumented to provide real-time monitoring, automated incident notifications, and relevant historic and real-time user metrics
• Comfort articulating complex technology solutions with a broad audience, from the technical team, VCs, product leaders, SMEs in the education space, teachers, and even kids!
• Scrappy and recent pre-seed or seed startup experience
• Positive outlook and a desire to build a company culture with humility, compassion, and radical candor
• A Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical degree

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of a proprietary, child-specific speech recognition technology, including defining technical requirements, planning for unique, competitive IP advantages, and scoping and project planning
• Write and review code, define engineering structure, resources, operations, and KPIs as the company scales
• Manage security, compliance, and data privacy policies, particularly ensuring COPPA compliance
• Lead an Agile startup environment, balancing rapid iteration and prototyping, compliance, processes, and long-term architectural planning
• Define the vision for the engineering organization and identify key hires
• Shape the engineering team across all platforms and be a thought leader in the field by applying AI to learning and the education space
• Mentor and develop a cross-functional team and instill structure as needed to ensure efficient product delivery
• Engage in strategic planning with the CEO, beginning with a 30/60/90 roadmap, helping to craft the technological vision, and pitching and fundraising to VCs

Preferred Qualifications

• An interest in the edtech space and an authentic desire to change the learning outcomes of children or experience in the Edtech industry
• Experience building ASR systems using state-of-the-art technology (e.g., wav2vec2, NeMo)
• Experience developing B2C products
• Ability and experience attracting a solid technical team
• Previous early-stage startup experience or napkin sketch to product launch experience