Head of Engineering

ITRADENETWORK LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES

iTradeNetwork’s purpose is to feed the world — and everything we do is guided by the principles below. Every team member is expected to embody and champion these principles across the organization.

Bias for Action

We value speed and avoid analysis paralysis. We develop conviction, make informed decisions quickly, and take calculated risks to maintain momentum — knowing that swift progress is essential for innovation and growth.

Customer Obsession

We work relentlessly to delight our customers. We work backward from their needs to solve pain points and create solutions that surprise and earn their loyalty. We obsess over customers, not competitors.

Data & Metrics Driven

We operate with facts, not opinions. We dive deep into data and use metrics to measure progress, ground every decision in rigorous analysis, and push for clarity and measurable outcomes.

Raise the Bar

We continuously push for improvement — in ourselves, our teams, and the company. We hire and develop exceptional talent, setting ever-higher standards that elevate performance and drive excellence.

Operational Excellence Through Process

We build lasting processes that optimize for efficiency. By developing, testing, and documenting each process, we create consistency and scale through automation, enabling continuous improvement across the business.

Ownership Mindset

We take responsibility for our work and aim for long-term success. We use resources wisely, stay accountable, and roll up our sleeves to get things done — no task is beneath us.

Earn Trust

We build trust through integrity, transparency, and mutual respect. We communicate openly, own our mistakes, listen actively, and remain open to feedback as an opportunity for growth.

JOB SUMMARY

iTradeNetwork is rebuilding its engineering organization to be AI-native: smaller, more senior, and dramatically more leveraged — delivering more output on the same budget. Engineering builds the agents that unlock capacity across the entire company.

As Head of Engineering, you own a product domain end-to-end within our supply chain software for perishables — where timing, traceability, and reliability aren't nice-to-haves, they're the product. You lead a lean, high-caliber team that ships through our agentic SDLC pipeline, and you report directly to the CTO as one of a small number of direct reports.

This is a technical leadership role: you set direction, own outcomes, and can go deep into architecture and code when the situation calls for it — but you lead through your team and our agent pipeline rather than serving as the primary coder. You need enough technical depth to evaluate architectural proposals from your leads, ask sharp questions, spot risk before it becomes an outage, and make the final call when tradeoffs are contested.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own your domain. Take full technical and delivery accountability for your area — architecture, quality, velocity, and outcomes.
• Lead a lean senior team. Manage and mentor ~2 engineering leads, several senior full-stack engineers, and a cohort of top-school new grads who are agent-native from day one, plus a coordinated offshore specialist pod.
• Ship through the agentic SDLC. Drive delivery through our orchestrated pipeline where AI agents draft specs, generate code, review PRs, and run QA — with named human approval at every gate. You are accountable for what ships.
• Raise per-engineer leverage. Push toward 2× per-engineer output by making your team excellent operators of AI tooling, not just consumers of it.
• Compress cycle time. Help move idea-to-production from months toward weeks without sacrificing the quality bar.
• Set the technical bar. Own architecture decisions and technical standards for your domain. Go into the code when it counts — reviewing, unblocking, or prototyping — without being the team's primary implementer.
• Evaluate technical proposals brought forward by your leads — understand tradeoffs (e.g., data consistency vs. latency, build vs. buy, monolith vs. services) well enough to push back constructively, not just rubber-stamp.
• Drive quality and reliability for systems where failures have real-world consequences — spoiled inventory, missed shipment windows, compliance/traceability gaps.
• Build the bench. Develop leads and grads into senior engineers; identify and close capability gaps on your team.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, TPM, Security, Operations, and peer engineering leaders to align roadmaps and shared platform investments.
• Represent engineering at the board level. Communicate technical strategy, risk, and progress to the board and executive stakeholders in clear, business-relevant terms.

What you’ll need:

• 12+ years in software engineering, with 6+ years leading engineering teams, including senior engineers
• Strong technical depth — you can design systems and read/review code credibly, even though day-to-day coding isn't the core of the role
• Demonstrated delivery ownership of a product or platform domain in production
• Fluency (or strong conviction and fast adoption) with AI-assisted / agentic development workflows and modern LLM tooling
• Track record of doing more with less: small senior teams, high leverage, high output
• Experience managing distributed teams, including offshore/onshore coordination
• Comfort operating in a fast-changing, high-accountability environment where you own outcomes end-to-end
• Experience communicating technical strategy and risk to executive or board-level audiences
• Experience with systems where correctness and timing matter under real-world constraints — supply chain, logistics, IoT/sensor data, inventory/warehouse management, food safety/traceability, or similar domains strongly preferred

Nice-to-Have Qualifications:

• Experience standing up or scaling an agentic SDLC or internal AI developer platform
• Background hiring and growing early-career engineers into strong operators quickly
• Prior experience in a PE-backed or Roper-style operating environment
• Exposure to modern cloud-native stacks (e.g., GCP, Node/NestJS, PostgreSQL, Datadog, or comparable)
• Familiarity with regulatory/compliance considerations in food supply chains (FSMA, traceability requirements, etc.)

What Success Looks Like

• Your team ships reliably through the agentic pipeline with quality gates held
• Measurable increase in per-engineer throughput (PRs per engineer / cycle time)
• A stronger, more senior US bench and a well-leveraged offshore specialist pod
• New grads ramp to productive, agent-native contributors within their first two quarters
• Idea-to-production timelines trending toward weeks, not months