Head of Engineering

About the role

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to own the technical foundation of Elayne as we scale from thousands of families to the infrastructure behind how wealth moves between generations.

This is a builder role with company-level technical ownership. You’ll inherit real systems and real constraints, decide what should evolve or be rebuilt, personally ship our hardest systems, and set the engineering standard as we scale.

The hard part of estate settlement isn’t model intelligence. It’s authorization, credentialed access, regulation, and complex logic. Elayne is one of a very small handful of companies ever granted a direct integration with the IRS. Access like that takes years to earn, can’t be replicated by a smarter model, and is the moat you’ll be building on and extending.

You’ll work directly with the CEO and have enormous influence over what Elayne becomes.

If you want to inherit a large team and manage it, this isn’t the role. If you want to build the technical spine of a category-defining company, we’d love to talk.

What you’ll own

• The estate record: the source of truth connecting people, assets, documents, authority, and actions across an estate
• Authorization: permissioning that determines who can access and act on highly sensitive financial and legal data
• Credentialed integrations: IRS, credit bureaus, government systems, and financial institutions, including credential lifecycles, reconciliation, retries, and failure recovery
• Security and data integrity: encryption, auditability, access controls, provenance, and systems designed for data that has to be right
• Engineering quality: the architecture, standards, and technical judgment the team is built around
• The team: help recruit exceptional engineers while remaining deeply hands-on yourself

A wrong output here can mean a rejected court filing, a missed asset, a foreclosed home, or weeks of delay for a grieving family. Correctness isn’t a QA metric, it’s part of our architecture.

Who we’re looking for

• You’re a builder first. Expect the large majority of your time, for at least the first 18 months, to be spent designing systems and shipping code
• You’ve owned production systems involving sensitive or regulated data, ideally fintech, identity, health, credentialing, or another correctness-critical environment
• You’re exceptional at backend architecture, relational data modeling, APIs, and distributed systems
• You’ve integrated with difficult third-party systems and know authentication, retries, reconciliation, and ugly edge cases are the real work
• You’ve been accountable for consequential technical decisions and can explain what you got right and what you got wrong
• You have strong opinions without needing to win the argument
• You want unusually large ownership and are comfortable with the responsibility that comes with it

How we work

We’re small, fast, and close to the people using what we build. Product decisions can start with a family conversation, a rejected filing, an institutional edge case, or something we had to do manually that software should absorb next.

Everyone here owns outcomes, not tickets. We communicate directly, move quickly, and care deeply about impact and getting the details right.

Location & compensation

Office in NoMad, NYC

$250,000 to $320,000 + meaningful equity

Medical, dental, and vision insurance + 401(k)

Equal opportunity

Elayne is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants based on ability, experience, and potential, and do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic under applicable federal, state, or local laws.

1. Intro conversation: get to know each other, the role, and what we’re building
2. Technical interviews: systems design session and project deep dive
3. Office session: a working session on a live problem and time with the team
4. Offer: we check references, then move fast