Title: Head of Engineering

Location: San Francisco | Full-Time | In-person 3-5 days/week

Reports To: CEO

Company

Tread is the AI-native operating system for the $660B construction materials logistics market: the aggregate, asphalt, and concrete behind every road, bridge, and building in the country.

Our customers run the gamut: enterprise producers and contractors that supply the world's largest infrastructure projects, alongside the family-owned hauling fleets that have moved the material this work depends on for generations. They're the operators who actually build the roads, bridges, and buildings around us. Most of the work still happens on paper tickets, phone calls, and disconnected scale houses. We're building the software they run on.

We crossed $1Bn in monthly delivered load value on the platform in March 2026. We’re at ~$XM ARR, and growing fast. Our enterprise customers reconcile real money, real freight, and real P&L against our data every day. Tread is the most important software they use.

We’re a Series A company backed by Mucker Capital.

We’re in growth mode. If you are fulfilled by ownership and a life-changing outcome, let’s connect.

Role

We’re looking for an experienced, relentless engineering leader to join us as the Head of Engineering.

You will partner directly with the CEO on building the category-defining operating system for construction materials logistics. The team you lead today is under 10 engineers shipping at aggressive velocity over a large, complex codebase by leaning heavily on AI coding agents. Our code has been ~100% AI-generated since March 2026.

Tread is also a financial system of record. We move freight, we move money, and our customers reconcile their business against our platform. Correctness, reliability, and trust are non-negotiable.

In this role, you will:

• Own engineering outcomes end-to-end: features, infrastructure, reliability, and correctness across every surface of the platform.
• Recruit top-tier talent and raise our bar for excellence. Push the team to strike the balance between speed and a reliable product. Have the hard conversations early.
• Drive the AI-native SDLC forward. Personally invest in the shared skills library, namespaced agent review pipelines, devcontainers, CI, and cloud agent infrastructure that lets a small team operate at scale.
• Set technical direction across the Rails API, data layer, payments business logic, and clients. Make build-vs-buy and platform-investment calls that balance speed with long-term leverage.
• Own platform reliability and trust posture: uptime, data integrity, payment accuracy, security, and incident response.
• Partner closely with the CEO on the product roadmap and serve as a key thought partner. The roadmap includes deepening AI agents into customer workflows and embedding fintech throughout the app (instant funding, ACH for B2B payments, financing).

Requirements

• 12+ years of engineering experience, 5+ years leading engineering teams.
• Background in hypergrowth startups. Ideally Seed through Series C, or founder experience.
• Fluent and opinionated about AI-native engineering. You’ve personally driven an agent-based SDLC and can speak to what worked, what didn’t, and where you’d take it next.
• Business-minded prioritization. You know when to opt for speed and when to double-down on foundational architecture.
• Experience operating payments or financial systems at scale.
• Deep technical credibility. You can read code, run system design conversations at any level, and make hard architectural calls.
• Hiring instincts at the senior and staff level. You can identify, calibrate, and close engineers who are stronger than you in their domain.
• Engineers who’ve worked with you choose to work with you again, and we’ll talk to them.
• Eager to work in-person at our San Francisco office 3-5 days/week.

Why Tread

• We’re building the software for the operators who build America. Construction materials logistics is essential infrastructure for an essential industry, and the incumbents are decades behind. 
• You’ll earn meaningful Series A equity in a business that has been substantially de-risked. We have product-market fit, paying enterprise customers, and a $1Bn+/month volume signal.
• We have clarity on what we need to do to win. We are in growth mode, not testing the waters. Our customers are bought in, and we are working with some of the largest haulers, producers, and contractors in the country.
• We’ve proven we can build better software than what’s in market, and we win consistently against our competitors.
• We are an AI-native engineering org from top to bottom. Our SDLC is built around coding agents, and continuing to invest in it is core to the SVP’s job, not a side project.
• We are building for an enduring industry that has to exist. Roads, bridges, buildings, and the materials that go into them are not going anywhere, regardless of what changes with technology or investor sentiment.
• You will work directly with the CEO, the SVP of Customer Operations, the SVP of Revenue, and the VP of Engineering. No layers between you and impact.
• We pay competitive salaries and offer real benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), unlimited PTO, and a transportation stipend.

Why You Shouldn’t Work With Us

• You are not excited to work in-person.
• You do not want to spend a lot of your time recruiting elite talent.
• You cannot put in the hard work to build a $B business.
• You want to treat AI tooling and SDLC strategy as someone else’s mandate.
• You prefer to lead at a level removed from the codebase, the customer, and the agent loop.
• You don’t ship high-quality code, fast.

Technology

Current stack: Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, React, TypeScript, Flutter, PostgreSQL, AWS.

AI tooling is part of the infrastructure: a shared skills library across Claude Code and Cursor, namespaced agent skills for diff review and PR feedback, devcontainers, fast feedback loops, pre-approved permissions, and cloud agent support. We deploy multiple times per week, review PRs the same day, and invest in testing and correctness up front so on-call stays light. Improving the SDLC is first-class engineering work.



Compensation

$200K–$260K base + 1.0%–2.0% equity

Interview Process

• Meeting with the CEO
• Meeting with the VP of Engineering and SVP of Customer Operations
• Technical and systems design session with the engineering team
• Reference conversations
• Offer