Head of Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $250K – $300K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

LiteLLM is the world's most popular AI Gateway, trusted by top companies like Adobe, Netflix, and NASA. Our platform empowers developers by providing secure, reliable access to LLMs and adjacent services, and we're looking for a Head of Engineering to lead the team building the leading OSS AI gateway.

About The Role
You own the outcomes, the process, and the team. You won't write all the code, but you own how the team ships: engineering productivity, code quality, release health, hiring, and the open-source community. You'll hold engineers accountable to the metrics they set for themselves, keep quality high as we ship fast, and own the enterprise relationship when things get hairy. This is director-level scope with a direct line to Head of Engineering, reporting to the founder/CTO. It's a genuinely hard problem because the surface is very large: 100+ provider integrations, day-zero model launches the day a new model drops, and a Rust migration in flight.

Responsibilities

• Hold engineers accountable to the metrics they set for themselves, and own the team's goals so they ship what they commit to

• Keep release health high as the team moves fast: stand up tracking, run root-cause on what slips through, own a weekly quality sync

• Drive well-architected, consistent code patterns across the team

• Own the technical roadmap with the CTO, including the Rust migration, and keep big changes gradual rather than overnight rewrites

• Own enterprise escalations end to end: a clear plan, crisp updates, and a fast path to resolution

• Analyze capacity needs, define the roles, and hire the engineers when more capacity is needed

• Look out for the open-source community and protect open-source adoption as the team scales

What We're Looking For

• Been an EM before, with a track record of managing and shipping through a team

• Metrics-driven: has stood up reliability or productivity metrics (on-time ship rate, regressions per release, MTTR) and used them to find root causes

• Has kept quality high on a fast-moving production system, with evidence of driving an incident or regression rate down (e.g. took P0s from X to Y)

• Root-cause and incident management: can point to incidents they ran postmortems on and the recurrence rate dropping after

• Process design: built tracking, review cadences, or release processes from scratch, with before/after numbers to show impact

• Goal-setting and accountability: has improved a team's on-time delivery or commitment-hit rate

• Customer-facing when it counts: has owned enterprise escalations and can show trust or retention held up after

• Hiring and scaling: has filled a defined headcount plan and can speak to time-to-hire and quality bar

• CS/engineering degree or equivalent hands-on engineering background

• Worked at a startup, familiar with messy codebases and doing rewrites

• Bonus: did this at an open-source company

• Bonus: scaled the eng team at a fast-growing startup

Why Join LiteLLM?

• High ownership: you own engineering productivity, quality, hiring, and the team's execution for the leading OSS AI gateway

• Director-level scope, clear path: four areas under you and a direct line to Head of Engineering. Real scope now, not after years of waiting

• Work directly with the CTO: you report to the founder/CTO and help set direction, not execute someone else's plan three layers down

• A genuinely hard technical problem: 100+ provider integrations, a Rust migration, and day-zero model launches. The challenge is real and interesting, not process theater

• High impact, in public: we work with NASA, Stripe, Adobe, and 84.51, and the work is open source. You'd be the person who scaled how LiteLLM is built, and the community sees it

• Competitive salary, health, dental, and vision benefits

About LiteLLM (https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm) is a Python SDK and Proxy Server enabling seamless calls to 100+ LLM APIs in the OpenAI format, trusted by industry leaders worldwide.

Ready to lead the team behind the most widely adopted AI gateway? Apply now!