Head of Engineering

About Mandolin

Nearly all disease will become treatable in our lifetimes, and drug discovery is quickly becoming an engineering discipline. Mandolin is building the “last-mile” delivery infrastructure that gets cutting-edge biologics, cell, and gene therapies to patients faster. Our AI-powered knowledge-worker platform already serves leading infusion clinics, with payers and pharma next in line.

We’re backed by Greylock, SignalFire, Maverick, and founders of famous companies like Yahoo, and led by repeat and exited founders with a team hailing from some of the most technically impressive companies.

Why we need you

As our founding Head of Engineering, you’ll lay the foundation for how we build—from people to processes to systems. You’ll be responsible for building and leading a high-performing engineering organization, ensuring operational excellence, and delivering reliable, scalable, and secure technology to our customers. You’ll also work closely with the executive team to set strategy, influence product direction, and help drive company-level priorities.

If you’re a builder who thrives in early-stage environments, loves leading with clarity and conviction, and wants to shape the technical culture of a company from the ground up—this role is for you.

What you’ll do

Build & Scale the Engineering Org

• Recruit, hire, and retain top-tier engineers across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and ML.

• Establish a clear and inclusive engineering culture grounded in excellence, speed, and ownership.

• Create thoughtful org design and team structures as we scale from a small founding team to a multi-team org.

Drive Engineering Execution & Delivery

• Implement engineering best practices across the stack: testing, CI/CD, security, observability, incident response, documentation.

• Ensure on-time, high-quality delivery of product features and infrastructure, in close partnership with Product and Design.

• Own technical planning and prioritization—balancing short-term needs with long-term architecture and scalability.

Cross-functional Leadership

• Partner with the executive team to align engineering priorities with company OKRs and customer commitments.

• Collaborate with Product, Operations, and GTM teams to ensure engineering supports evolving business and user needs.

• Represent engineering in strategic discussions—from roadmap planning to fundraising to customer onboarding.

Set Technical Vision

• Guide architecture decisions and lead technical reviews.

• Own and evolve our infrastructure, codebase, and system reliability.

• Help shape how we apply AI in production: model deployment, data pipelines, privacy and safety.

Must-have experience

• Have a minimum of 5+ in engineering leadership (e.g. Head of Eng, Director, or early-stage EM).

• Have led engineering teams in fast-paced, early-stage environments—and helped scale them successfully.

• Are deeply fluent in modern software engineering and cloud-based infrastructure (bonus for experience with ML, AI/LLMs, or healthcare systems).

• Lead with empathy, structure, and clarity—your teams trust you to remove ambiguity and build confidence.

• Know how to ship fast without cutting corners, and believe in systems that scale.

• Have excellent communication skills and are comfortable influencing across functions and to the board.

Nice-to-haves

• Have worked in healthtech, life sciences, or a regulated space.

• Have experience supporting AI/ML teams or building production-grade ML infrastructure.

• Have a track record of building diverse and inclusive teams from the ground up.