Propkee - Head of Engineering

About the Role

We’re an ambitious, AI-native company in prop-commerce. The next 12–18 months are about turning hard, ambiguous problems into robust systems with real users. We’re looking for a Founding Engineer who thrives on building end-to-end: designing data models, writing production code, and shipping fast.

This is a hands-on IC role (no people management at the start). You’ll be the technical bedrock - building the first versions of complex systems, then scaling them into reusable patterns as the team grows.

What You’ll Build in the First 6 Months

• AI platform capabilities

  : Prompt orchestration, retrieval, function calling, streaming UX, and evaluation guardrails.

• High-throughput content processing

  : Ingestion pipelines, storage, delivery, with observability + cost control.

• Identity, privacy, and trust

  : Consent-driven flows, signed tokens, rate limits, audit trails, abuse prevention.

• Data platform

  : Normalize external data, model entities/relationships, and expose clean APIs.

• Product surfaces

  : Ship Flutter apps (buyer/seller) and ReactJS dashboards with reliability and performance budgets.

• Operational excellence

  : Monitoring, alerting, automated tests, incident playbooks, and a sane release cadence.

Tech Stack

• Backend

  : Java 23, Spring Boot 3, Python

• Database

  : PostgreSQL

• App

  : Flutter

• Admin & Seller Web

  : ReactJS

• Cloud

  : AWS (EC2, RDS, S3)

• AI Tooling

  : OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, vector search (pgvector/Pinecone), LangChain/LlamaIndex (pragmatic, not bloated).

Must-Haves

• 6 - 10+ years building

  production systems

  as the primary builder. Exceptional earlier-career builders welcome with proof.
• Hands-on

  Java + Spring Boot

  experience, plus comfort with

  Python

  .
• Exposure to

  Flutter or ReactJS

  in production.
• Strong systems thinking: data models, performance budgets, failure handling.
• Security & privacy instincts: PII handling, consent flows, audit trails.
• Excellent written communication: crisp docs, READMEs, and runbooks.

Nice-to-Haves

• AI production experience (retrieval, evals, streaming, failure handling).
• Media processing at scale (transcoding, delivery, captioning).
• Marketplace/fintech trust & safety (risk signals, abuse prevention).
• Growth engineering (instrumentation, experimentation).

What You Won’t Do (to start)

• Manage people - this is a

  builder role first.

• Architect by slide deck - your design docs end in merged PRs and measurable user impact.

Career Path & Title

Head of Engineering.

• Principal/Distinguished IC (maximizing technical leverage), or
• CTO/VP Eng (when a team exists and needs leadership).

Compensation

outsized ownership for outsized builders.