Head of Engineering

About Argon

At Argon, we’re on a mission to transform how life-changing therapies are brought to patients. We’re building the AI operating system for the biopharma companies of the future, where humans and AIs work alongside one another to handle complex research, writing, and coordination workflows.

We’re honored to enable the next generation of scientists and pharma companies to bring life-saving therapies to market faster and more efficiently. We value kindness, intensity, direct communication, intellectual honesty, and grit. Join us if you want to be productive, ship, and help build a generational company.

We are an in-person company with offices in NYC. For non-NYC residents, we are happy to help cover moving and related expenses.

Why this role

If you’re excited about building a high-velocity engineering culture, designing a robust platform that will power the future of life sciences work, and pushing the forefront of AI products that accelerate the delivery of life-saving therapies, this role is for you. This is a high ownership role with real decision making authority, and comes with major equity upside.

Velocity is our advantage. Your north star will be compressing the build-ship-feedback-iterate loop without sacrificing product quality. This role has:

• High ownership & autonomy
• Frontier technical challenges
• Equity upside
• Blend of IC & manager time

You’ll have the unique opportunity to help set our engineering culture and systems, so that we minimize time to ship and time spent revisiting code. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will design, code, and spin up systems and new architectures, while shaping our organization and how we operate as a team.

What you bring

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with hands on coding experience in your most recent role.
• Prior roles such as Principal/Staff/Senior Engineer, Tech Lead/Tech Lead Manager, Engineering Manager (hands-on), or Head of Engineering at Series B - FAANG companies.
• Proven owner of engineering velocity and SDLC: you run lightweight planning/retros, track lead time/MTTR/change failure rate, drive multiple projects in parallel, keep tight loops with Product/Design/Ops—and raise the bar on code quality, testing, reviews, and release discipline without slowing flow.
• Reliability at speed: deep experience with asynchronous patterns (queues, DLQs, idempotency, backoff/retry, replay, concurrency/eventual consistency), plus pragmatic CI/CD, observability (tracing/metrics/logging), SLOs/alerting, incident response, infra-as-code, and solid security basics.
• Track record of shipping distributed systems at high-growth teams; you’ve made pragmatic, opinionated platform calls that improved developer speed and product reliability.
• Deep experience with modern typed backends (one or more of: Node/TypeScript, Python, Go), PostgreSQL, and building asynchronous workflows with concurrency and eventual consistency.
• Fluency with AWS and Kubernetes (SQS/SNS, S3, IAM, VPC) and systems-level concerns (observability, CI/CD, reliability engineering, security basics).
• Strong database and data modeling instincts; you’ve tuned queries, managed migrations, and built for correctness and performance.
• Hyper-communicative and detail-oriented; you write clearly, plan carefully, and keep stakeholders aligned without process bloat.
• Care deeply about code quality and developer ergonomics; you set standards and hold the line through reviews, tooling, and mentorship.

Nice to have

• Experience with React/Next.js and building intuitive, high-quality UIs.
• AI-native product experience: prompt engineering, LLM orchestration, retrieval/re-ranking, evaluation frameworks.
• Product sense and user empathy; you balance shipping fast with building the right abstractions and great UX.
• Data and pipeline experience (ingestion, indexing, ETL/ELT, streaming).
• Prior Head of Engineering/Tech Lead Manager experience; ex-founder or founding engineer background.

Compensation

• $200,000-$350,000 base salary with 1%-5% equity