Estuary is simplifying how the world moves data so teams can build, adapt, and innovate without limits.

About Estuary

Estuary is reshaping how the world moves data. Our right time data platform unifies CDC, batch, and streaming into one dependable system, eliminating the need to stitch together fragmented ETL and replication tools. We are also one of the first data infrastructure companies shipping into the AI agent stack. Our skills library plugs directly into Claude, Cursor, and other assistants, turning Estuary into a tool agents can actually use.

We help data teams build modern, real-time infrastructure that powers analytics, operations, and AI without the complexity and cost of legacy tools. Backed by top investors and led by experienced repeat founders in data infrastructure, we recently raised a $17M Series A led by M13.

As organizations shift toward right-time architectures, the market is moving fast, and we are too. We are looking for a contract technical writer who can translate this platform into deep, useful content that data teams actually want to read and that ranks for the queries our buyers run when they are evaluating tools.

The Role

This is a senior contract seat for a writer who can grasp technical concepts quickly and translate them into content that engineers respect. You will work directly with the VP Marketing, our SEO and growth marketing lead to produce technical blog content on data pipelines, streaming architecture, and the data infrastructure powering agentic and operational AI.

This is not a role for a generalist content writer who needs an engineer to translate every concept. We are looking for someone who can read a technical spec or sit in a 30-minute call with a product engineer and walk away ready to write. You will need strong opinions, the discipline to ship on agreed dates, and the ability to write clearly about complex infrastructure.

What You'll Do

• Rewrite and produce technical blog posts (typically 1,500–3,000 words) 
• Build hands-on tutorials with working code and reproducible setups
• Produce evaluation guides and architectural comparison content
• Provide editorial polish on all deliverables
• Partner with our SEO and content leads to align deliverables with search intent and pillar strategy

What You Bring

• A portfolio of published technical writing that demonstrates depth and a distinct point of view
• The ability to grasp technical concepts quickly and explain them clearly. You can pick up a new system, read the docs, ask the right questions, and produce content that holds up under technical scrutiny
• Comfort writing about infrastructure and AI topics without hand-waving or filler
• Strong writing and editing chops: you can produce a tutorial, a deep dive, and a comparison piece without heavy editing
• Bias toward shipping: you move from a blank page to a publishable draft quickly and know when something is ready
• Self-directed working style and reliable turnaround on agreed deliverable dates
• Editorial judgment: you push back on jargon, hype words, and weak language

Bonus Points If You

• Have a data engineering, developer relations, or developer-facing engineering background
• Have worked at a data infrastructure, dev tools, or modern data stack company
• Have built or contributed to open source data infrastructure projects
• Have a conference talk, community-building, or DevRel track record
• Have written content that ranks for competitive technical search queries
• Have used AI tooling (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, perplexity) to accelerate research and drafting workflows

Why Estuary

• A category that is moving: the modern data stack is being rebuilt around real-time and AI, and we are positioned at the center of it
• Genuinely interesting technical surface area, with room to go deep on the topics you find most compelling
• Remote, project-based, and flexible by design

Engagement Details

• Contract, project-based with flexible hours
• Per-deliverable rate, scoped at kickoff based on length and complexity
• Fully remote, US-based or US-time-zone friendly preferred
• Immediate start

How to Apply

Send a short note, your rate expectations, and 2–3 writing samples that demonstrate technical depth. 

Location: Remote (US)

Department: Sales

Reports to: Head of Sales / GTM Lead

Compensation: Base + Commission + Equity

About Estuary

Estuary is reshaping the future of data movement. Our platform unifies batch and real-time pipelines into a single, reliable system — eliminating the need to stitch together fragmented ETL and streaming tools.

We help data teams move and sync data across systems with low latency, strong guarantees, and production-grade reliability. As organizations shift toward real-time architectures, traditional batch-only solutions are no longer enough. Estuary enables teams to build modern data infrastructure without unnecessary complexity.

Backed by top investors and led by experienced founders in the data infrastructure space, our mission is to make real-time data practical and accessible for every organization.

What You'll Do

• Own the full sales cycle from outbound prospecting through close for mid-market, data-forward organizations.
• Lead consultative discovery conversations with technical and commercial stakeholders.
• Position Estuary as a modern alternative to legacy ETL tools and fragmented streaming stacks.
• Navigate complex buying committees that include data engineers, Heads of Data, and finance stakeholders.
• Build and manage pipeline with strong CRM discipline in HubSpot.
• Partner closely with Sales Engineering, Marketing, and Leadership to refine messaging, ICP definition, and competitive positioning.
• Consistently meet and exceed new logo and ARR quotas.

What You Bring

• 3–6 years of closing experience in SaaS, data infrastructure, or developer-focused products.
• Proven track record of hitting or exceeding quota in a new business role.
• Comfort selling into technical buyers (data engineers, analytics engineers, platform teams).
• Working knowledge of modern data stack concepts: ETL/ELT, CDC, data warehouses, streaming pipelines.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate technical value into business impact.
• Self-starter mentality with the ambition to grow into a senior or enterprise-focused sales role as we scale.

Bonus Points If You

• Have experience selling to data engineers or platform teams.
• Have worked at an early-stage startup in the data infrastructure or developer tooling space.
• Are familiar with tools such as Fivetran, Airbyte, Kafka, dbt, or Snowflake.
• Have experience navigating multi-threaded deals with both technical and commercial stakeholders.

Why Join Us?

• Help define how real-time data infrastructure is sold.
• Be early enough to shape GTM strategy, not just execute it.
• Work alongside a deeply technical team building category-defining infrastructure.
• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits.
• Remote-first culture with meaningful ownership and impact.
  

At Estuary, we’re building the infrastructure that powers real-time data movement — helping companies sync, transform, and operationalize data across databases, warehouses, and streaming systems.

Following a $17M Series A led by M13, we’re entering the next phase of growth — expanding the product, scaling the team, and continuing to build and scale our core data platform. 

We’re hiring a founding Product Manager to help shape what we build and why.  You’ll work directly with our founders, engineers, and customers to define product direction across the core platform — from control plane to connectors to user experience.

This is an early, high-impact role where you’ll directly shape what we build next.

This is not a “process PM” role. You’ll be expected to form strong opinions, get close to users, and drive decisions in a fast-moving, highly technical environment — with the autonomy to move quickly and the responsibility to get it right. 

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to product direction across key areas of the platform, including but not limited to:
  • Control plane (workflow orchestration, management, reliability)
  • Connector ecosystem (source/destination integrations, developer experience)
  • User experience (UI, onboarding, usability of complex workflows)
  • AI-driven features and tooling, helping users automate, optimize, or gain insights from real-time data
• Work directly with customers and prospects to deeply understand their data infrastructure use cases and translate that into product priorities.
• Develop PRDs which disentangle the complex relationships between systems we connect with and our product to speed up engineering implementations and align them with customer needs.
• Partner closely with engineering to define, scope, and ship features
• Effectively prioritize limited resources to ensure we utilize them as efficiently as possible to deliver customer value.
• Develop and communicate product roadmap and priorities, bringing clarity to what we’re building and why
• Act as a connective layer across the company, aligning engineering, go-to-market, and leadership around product direction

What We’re Looking For

• 4–8 years of experience in product management, engineering, or a highly technical, product-adjacent role
• Experience working on developer tools, data infrastructure, or technical products (e.g. data pipelines, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure)
• A strong capability to apply modern AI tools to the product lifecycle
• Proven track record of working closely with engineering teams to ship products
• Thrives in ambiguity and early-stage environments with a curious outlook and get it done no matter what attitude
• Track record of talking to users, uncovering real problems, and turning those insights into product direction

Nice to Have

• Background in data engineering, analytics, or distributed systems
• Experience building or working with connectors, ETL/ELT pipelines, or streaming systems
• Early-stage startup experience

Why Estuary

• Work directly with the founding team on core product decisions
• Own meaningful product surface area from day one
• Small, high-performing team — low process, high ownership
• Remote-first with quarterly offsites in places like Miami, Boulder, and Austin
• Competitive compensation and equity

Estuary unifies change data capture, batch pipelines, and streaming into one platform.  Teams use us to move and transform data across their stack in real time, without stitching together separate ETL, replication, and streaming tools.

We work with modern data and platform teams who need reliable pipelines, predictable costs, and flexible deployment options.

Your Opportunity

As Estuary's first Customer Success Manager, you'll own the post-sale relationship for our customers: data engineers, platform leads, and the teams who depend on Estuary to keep their pipelines running. 

It's a hybrid role, part relationship owner, part technical problem-solver.  You'll be the person customers trust to keep them successful, and technical enough to resolve most issues yourself. 

This is a rare build-it-yourself opportunity. There's no playbook sitting on a shelf waiting for you, because it doesn't exist yet. You'll invent it: how we onboard customers, how we track account health, and how we turn happy customers into champions and expansion revenue. 

You won't just be filling a seat, you'll be laying the foundation of a function you'll grow and lead as we scale.

What You'll Do

• Build our Customer Success function from the ground up: onboarding, health monitoring, and the account management playbook.

• Own the post-sale customer journey, from onboarding through renewal and expansion.

• Be the primary point of contact for your accounts, building real relationships and running business reviews that go beyond a status update.

• Use AI tools to build dashboards and health-monitoring views for account status, usage, and risk.

• Track key stakeholders at each account and have a plan for onboarding new contacts when roles change.

• Monitor account health and get ahead of risk before it becomes a churn or renewal problem.

• Troubleshoot and resolve most technical issues yourself, day-to-day.

• Know when to loop in Solutions Engineering, and hand off cleanly with the right context.

• Identify and drive expansion opportunities: new use cases, new teams, new pipelines.

• Act as the customer's internal advocate, routing feedback to Product and Engineering.

What You'll Bring

• Experience in customer success, technical account management, or a similar role, ideally at a SaaS, data infrastructure, or dev tools company.

• A real builder's instinct. You've either built a CS function or process before, or you're itching to, and you don't need a playbook handed to you to know what good looks like.

• Genuine comfort with technical concepts: APIs, databases, warehouses, ETL/ELT. Enough to troubleshoot and hold your own in a technical conversation.

• Comfort using AI tools to build reporting, dashboards, or health-monitoring systems from scratch. You don't need to be an engineer, but you should be resourceful enough to build the tooling you need rather than wait for someone to build it for you.

• Strong account management instinct: you build trust, spot risk early, and turn happy customers into advocates and expansion opportunities.

• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate technical detail into business value.

• A proactive, ownership-driven approach: you notice risk or opportunity before it's escalated to you.

Nice to Have

• Experience with tools like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Kafka, Fivetran, or Airbyte.

• Early-stage startup experience, ideally as an early or first CS hire.

• Familiarity with CDC or streaming architectures.

Why Estuary?

• Build the Customer Success function from the ground up, reporting directly to our CEO, with real potential to grow and lead a team as we scale.

• Collaborative, high-performing team pushing the envelope in data infrastructure.

• Early-stage startup: your limit is your imagination, not your job description.

• Remote-first culture with autonomy.

• Quarterly offsites in places like Miami, Boulder, and Austin.

• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.

Experience: 8+ Years

Estuary is a real-time data integration platform built for both fast-moving developers and large-scale enterprises. We combine change data capture (CDC), stream processing, and declarative configuration into a unified system that simplifies complex data movement. With Estuary, teams build reliable, low-latency pipelines—without the overhead of managing data infrastructure.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join our Capture or Materialization teams. These teams are the bridge between Estuary and the rest of the data ecosystem. You will be responsible for building the high-performance connectors that extract data from diverse sources and reliably load it into downstream destinations.

Success in this role requires a blend of low-level systems engineering and high-level product intuition. You won't just be connecting endpoints; you’ll be deeply investigating how different SaaS platforms and databases behave, uncovering their unique constraints, and architecting robust ways to move their data in real time. This is a polyglot engineering environment. While much of our connector ecosystem is built in Go, we also leverage Python and Rust where they are the best tool for the job. 

What You’ll Do

• Master SaaS & Protocol Internals: Deeply research and understand the "behavior" of SaaS APIs (e.g., Salesforce, Stripe, NetSuite) and database protocols. You’ll determine the most robust ways to interact with them, considering rate limits, consistency models, and hidden edge cases.
• Build Polyglot Integrations: Design and maintain robust, scalable connectors written primarily in Go, while also contributing to or maintaining components in Python and Rust.
• Architect for Reliability: Build systems that handle distributed state, "exactly-once" delivery guarantees, and sophisticated backpressure management to ensure data is never lost or duplicated.
• Navigate Technical Entropy: Bridge the gap between the "messy" reality of external APIs and the high-performance requirements of the Estuary core engine.
• Collaborate & Mentor: Participate in technical design docs and code reviews, helping the team maintain high standards for performance, correctness, and developer experience.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience: You have a track record of building and operating production-grade systems at scale.
• Pragmatic Polyglot: You are highly proficient in Go, but you are also comfortable working in (or learning) Python and Rust. You care about using the right tool for the specific integration challenge.
• Systems Thinking: You enjoy "detective work"—digging into third-party documentation and API behavior to understand how to build a truly reliable integration.
• Data Fluency: You understand the nuances of data movement—including checkpointing, schema drift, and the trade-offs between different consistency models.
• Strong Fundamentals: A deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and networking (gRPC, TCP/IP).
• Clear Communication: Ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical Experience: While a degree can be helpful, we value equivalent practical experience and your demonstrated ability to solve hard problems at scale.

We know that excellence comes in many forms. If you don’t meet 100% of these qualifications but have a strong systems background and are excited about what we’re building, we encourage you to apply.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with Rust: We use Rust in our core engine, so familiarity with it (or a strong desire to learn) is a plus.
• Data Infrastructure Background: Experience with Change Data Capture (CDC), Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming technologies.
• Open Source Contributions: Experience contributing to or maintaining data-centric open-source projects.
• Startup Grit: Experience in fast-paced environments where you’ve balanced rapid iteration with long-term system stability.

Why Estuary?

Estuary is VC-backed and led by experienced, repeat founders. We are building a diverse, low-ego team that values ownership, fast iteration, and mutual respect.

We offer:

• Competitive compensation, equity, and full benefits.
• Flexible remote work with a culture that respects work-life boundaries.
• A high-autonomy environment where your contributions have a direct impact on the product.
• Quarterly team offsites in cities like Miami, Austin, Boulder, and New Orleans to build community and connection.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Compliance Engineer to join our security and compliance function. Our SOC 2 and HIPAA programs are mature and audited. Two areas will have your attention from the start: GDPR, where EU enterprise demand keeps raising the bar across our category, and PCI DSS, which this role will lead as customer demand builds. You will drive both, while keeping the established programs running at the standard our customers expect.

This is a governance role first. You will be the person who designs the control set, automates the evidence, runs the audit cycle, keeps policy current as the company and product change, and answers the hard questions on a customer security call. The role also covers corporate IT, because identity and endpoint management are where a meaningful share of those controls operate day to day.

Success requires a blend of deep framework expertise and practical systems judgment. You will be translating abstract control language into automation and defaults engineers can work with, rather than policy that sits apart from the work.

Compliance at Estuary carries commercial weight, not just risk weight. Customers move sensitive data through our platform, and our ability to show exactly how it is protected is part of what earns that. This work is visible to customers in a way compliance often isn't.

A note on fit. This role spans governance and IT; we are looking for someone who has been the person accountable for a compliance program rather than a contributor to one, and who can also run the systems underneath it. We are not looking for a systems administrator who has been adjacent to audits. If your experience is primarily device and identity administration without program ownership, this is likely not the right role, and we would rather tell you that here than in a fourth interview.

What You'll Do

Governance and Compliance

• Deepen Our GDPR Program: Estuary exists to move customer data across systems, which puts privacy close to the product. Take our GDPR program to the depth EU enterprise buyers' counsel look for across records of processing, lawful basis, DPAs and sub-processor management, cross-border transfer mechanisms, data residency commitments, retention, and DSAR handling.
• Lead Our PCI DSS Effort: Take us to attestation as a service provider, as a planned and resourced program rather than a reaction to one deal. Scope how the platform's role in moving customer data maps to the requirements, run the gap assessment, sequence the remediation, and carry us through attestation.
• Sustain SOC 2 and HIPAA: Run the day to day of two programs with a good audit track record: continuous evidence collection, access reviews, control testing, auditor coordination, BAAs and PHI handling. Both programs are in good standing, and your job is to keep them there as the company and the product surface grow.
• Risk and Assessments: Keep our risk register and system of record current, working with the engineers and leaders who hold each risk. Run vendor and sub-processor assessments, coordinate penetration testing, and keep security awareness training on schedule.
• Keep Compliance Scope Current as the Platform Evolves: As Estuary's architecture, deployment options, and vendor footprint change, the compliance boundary moves with them. You will work out what each change means for scope, controls, and customer commitments, and keep our documentation and customer-facing answers current as it happens.
• Support Enterprise Diligence: Partner with sales on security questionnaires, vendor risk reviews, and customer audits, so buyers get accurate answers quickly. Maintain a trust center and keep our security documentation current.
• Keep Us Incident Ready: Maintain and exercise incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery plans alongside engineering. Be the calm, organized presence when a plan has to be used.

The Systems Underneath

• Run Identity and Access: SSO and IdP administration, provisioning and deprovisioning, MFA, and least privilege. Keep extending the automation behind access reviews so they draw directly from system state.
• Run Endpoints and the SaaS Estate: Device management and MDM, endpoint security, onboarding and offboarding, vendor procurement and security review, license hygiene, and full visibility into the SaaS estate.
• Automate the Evidence Path: Extend our compliance automation and evidence collection so controls stay continuously satisfied by default and keep shrinking the set that needs manual effort.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years in compliance, GRC, or security governance: You have personally carried organizations through audits and come out the other side, at companies where the product was the thing being audited. Program ownership is the requirement here, not audit participation.
• You Have Built, Not Just Maintained: You have stood up at least one compliance program from close to nothing. You know what the first ninety days look like, which gaps matter, and how to sequence remediation when everything is technically a finding.
• SOC 2 Depth: You have run a SOC 2 Type II through a full audit cycle, and you know the difference between a control that passes and a control that works.
• Privacy Fluency: You are genuinely comfortable with GDPR mechanics: data processing agreements, lawful basis, transfer mechanisms, sub-processor management, and data residency. Not just familiar with the acronym.
• Policy and Judgment: You write policy that is precise enough to audit against and practical enough for the team to work with, you can make and document a defensible risk acceptance decision, and you can explain your reasoning to an auditor and stand behind it.
• Hands-On Systems Ownership: You have run identity, device, and SaaS administration for a distributed company yourself. You are as comfortable in an IdP admin console as you are in an audit workbook.
• Systems Thinking: You enjoy detective work: tracing how a system behaves under load, where data moves and who can reach it, and where documented process and lived process diverge.
• Engineering Empathy: You can read a cloud architecture diagram, hold your own with engineers about infrastructure and access controls, and design controls that hold up without slowing delivery.
• Clear Communication: Ability to explain complex compliance trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including a prospect's CISO on a live call.
• Practical Experience: Certifications like CISSP, CISA, or CIPP/E are welcome. What we weigh most heavily is a track record of programs you have run end to end.

We know that excellence comes in many forms. If you don't meet 100% of these qualifications but have carried a compliance program through a full audit cycle and are excited about what we're building, we encourage you to apply.

Bonus Points For

• Direct PCI DSS Experience: Hands-on with PCI scoping, cardholder data environments, and the SAQ or ROC process, especially as a service provider rather than a merchant.
• ISO 27001: Experience building toward or maintaining certification, and mapping a shared control set across overlapping frameworks.
• Data Infrastructure Context: Experience supporting a data platform, ETL or CDC vendor, or a similar company where customer data is the product surface.
• Compliance Automation Tooling: Hands-on with platforms like Vanta, Drata, or Secureframe, and clear eyed about where they help and where they don't.
• Public Sector Exposure: Familiarity with FedRAMP, StateRAMP, or NIST 800-53, enough to tell us honestly what that path would demand.
• Startup Grit: Experience in fast-paced environments where you've balanced rapid iteration with durable process.

Why Estuary?

Estuary is VC-backed and led by experienced, repeat founders. We are building a diverse, low-ego team that values ownership, fast iteration, and mutual respect.

We offer:

• Competitive compensation, equity, and full benefits.
• Flexible remote work with a culture that respects work-life boundaries.
• A high-autonomy environment where your contributions have a direct impact on the product.
• Quarterly team offsites in cities like Miami,

Estuary is a real-time data integration platform built for both fast-moving developers and large-scale enterprises. We combine change data capture (CDC), stream processing, and declarative configuration into a unified system that simplifies complex data movement. With Estuary, teams build reliable, low-latency pipelines — without the overhead of managing data infrastructure.

The Role

As a Senior Systems Engineer, you will be a core contributor to our Control and Data Planes. This is a high-impact role where you will build the high-performance backbone that manages distributed state, ensures sub-second latency, and scales to handle massive throughput. You’ll join a high-trust, collaborative team that values technical excellence, diverse perspectives, and clear communication.

What You’ll Do

• Architect & Build: Design and implement high-performance components for our data plane (stream processing and transport) and control plane (orchestration and state management).
• Optimize for Scale: Profile and optimize systems primarily written in Rust to minimize latency and maximize resource efficiency.
• Solve Distributed Problems: Lead initiatives around fault tolerance, consensus protocols (e.g., Raft), and high-performance networking.
• Ensure Correctness: Write production-grade, highly-tested code and participate in thoughtful code reviews that help the whole team level up.
• Collaborate & Mentor: Participate in technical design docs and code reviews, helping the team maintain high standards for performance, correctness, and developer experience.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of experience in backend software development, with a focus on distributed systems or real-time infrastructure.
• Systems Programming Expertise: Proficiency in Rust is highly preferred. Significant experience in Go or C/C++ with a desire to master Rust is also great.
• Experience with Large-Scale Systems: You have a track record of building and operating systems that handle significant traffic or complex distributed state.
• Strong Fundamentals: A deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and networking (gRPC, TCP/IP).
• Clear Communication: Ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical Experience: While a degree can be helpful, we value equivalent practical experience and your demonstrated ability to solve hard problems at scale.

We know that excellence comes in many forms. If you don’t meet 100% of these qualifications but have a strong systems background and are excited about what we’re building, we encourage you to apply.

Bonus Points For

• Data Infrastructure Background: Experience with Change Data Capture (CDC), Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming technologies.
• Open Source Contributions: Experience contributing to or maintaining data-centric open-source projects.
• Startup Grit: Experience in fast-paced environments where you’ve balanced rapid iteration with long-term system stability.

Why Estuary?

Estuary is VC-backed and led by experienced, repeat founders. We are building a diverse, low-ego team that values ownership, fast iteration, and mutual respect.

We offer:

• Competitive compensation, equity, and full benefits.
• Flexible remote work with a culture that respects work-life boundaries.
• A high-autonomy environment where your contributions have a direct impact on the product.
• Quarterly team offsites in cities like Miami, Austin, Boulder, and New Orleans to build community and connection.

Level: Director
Location: Remote US
Reports to: CTO

What’s the role

Estuary powers "right-time" data replication and transform: from sub-second CDC replication to terabyte-scale OLAP data flows. That spans a lot of surface area, including a streaming runtime and control plane, hundreds of source and destination integrations, a transformation and SQL experience our users live in daily, and a growing set of AI capabilities on top of all of it.

We're hiring a Head of Engineering to own the engineering function: strategy, people, delivery, and operations. You'll join the leadership team as a partner to our founder CTO, owning engineering's direction as well as its delivery, while the CTO stays deep in architecture and the long-range technical bets.

Day to day, that means growing the leaders who run our teams, deciding what the organization needs to look like twelve and twenty-four months out, and being accountable for what engineering ships and what it costs. You're not starting from zero: engineering is already organized into teams with capable leads who own real scope and ship a product customers depend on daily. What's changing is scale: in the surface area we support, in what we ask each team to own, and in the size of the customers betting their data infrastructure on us.

We will grow the team, but headcount is not our primary lever. Estuary's leverage comes from strong tooling, clear ownership, and a high hiring bar, and we add people when the work genuinely demands it rather than on a schedule. The job here is making a compact team formidable rather than building a large one.

What you’ll do

• Own the engineering roadmap and its execution. Be accountable for what we ship, when, and at what quality. Develop the processes and team loops that wrangle the competing needs of customers, partners, marketing, operations, and long-term product vision into a focused and achievable technical pipeline, across every part of the stack rather than one slice of it.
• Set technical strategy with the CTO. Own the engineering half of where the product goes: build versus buy, what we invest in ahead of demand, which architectural bets are worth the disruption, and what we deliberately don't do. Make the case for those choices to the co-founders and, when it matters, to the board.
• Grow leaders. Develop the tech leads/engineering managers already running our teams, and grow their ranks as the org expands. Coach on the judgment calls that come with scope: where to set the bar, when to decide with incomplete information, how to have the hard conversation early. Build the management practice at Estuary, including how we level, review, and grow people, on top of the culture that's already here.
• Design the org ahead of the need. Judge when a team has grown past its structure, where a new one should form, how ownership gets redrawn as the product expands, and when to add process. Own headcount planning and the engineering budget, and defend both, including the decision not to hire. Layer the right practices at the right time, and no sooner.
• Represent engineering at the company level. Set expectations with the co-founders and with our compliance, marketing, sales, and support leads. Turn strategy into sequenced, staffed commitments, and surface the constraints, including what's achievable, what it costs, and what breaks, early enough to change the plan. Show up for the customer conversations where an engineering leader is what closes the gap.
• Own reliability as a business outcome. Define what our SLOs should be with the people who sell and support the product, then hold the organization to them. Safeguard Estuary's "fix bugs first" culture and protect our reputation for customer support and success as we grow.
• Operational excellence. Develop and champion quality standards and strategies for risk minimization across the platform. Improve development processes and developer experience. Own our engineering posture on security and compliance as our customers get larger and their diligence gets sharper.
• Hiring engine. Partner with in-house recruiting, who own sourcing, to shape the rest of the engineering candidate experience: screening, interview structure, scoring, and onboarding. Own leadership hiring yourself. Keep the bar high as we grow.
• Stay close to the work. You'll read design proposals, ask the right questions, and hold your own in a technical debate about our stack. You won't be in the critical path of shipping, but a Head of Engineering here is expected to have opinions grounded in how the system actually works.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building software, with 4+ years leading engineering teams, including experience as a manager of managers.
• Experience owning an engineering function in the range of 20 to 50 engineers. What interests us is the leverage you got out of that team rather than how large it became.
• A track record of developing engineering leaders, not just engineers. You can point to specific people whose careers accelerated under you, and to managers you hired who are still leading well.
• Depth in data-intensive systems such as distributed systems, streaming, storage, or query engines, plus the judgment to hold a credible technical conversation across a broad stack you don't personally own.
• Proven ability to lead, introduce structure, and nurture engineering excellence across multiple teams in a complex domain, preferably B2B. This includes inheriting a functioning organization and earning its trust before changing how it works.
• Experience partnering with a founder or CTO on technical strategy, including the part where you disagree productively.
• Comfort spanning infrastructure work and user-facing product work, and setting priorities between them.
• Ability to communicate at all levels, and discuss nuanced technical concepts with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, up to and including customers and the board.
• Experience leading and organizing incident response in high stakes settings.

How we work

• High autonomy; engineers own the full feature lifecycle and often engage directly with users.
• Remote-first, Slack-centric, async-friendly with VCs as needed.
• Global team with a skew towards east-coast working hours.

Compensation & leveling

Market‑competitive cash + equity.