ABOUT THE ROLE

Location: Remote in US or Canada

At Jona, we’re transforming how clinicians and consumers understand and optimize their gut microbiome. Our AI-powered platform decodes complex microbiome data and translates it into actionable insights—supporting better outcomes, stronger immunity, and longer health spans.

We’re looking for a player-coach, hands-on Head of Engineering to help us scale our core product. You’ll lead a small, high-performing team while staying close to the code—shipping features, shaping architecture, and bringing AI-powered capabilities into production.

This is a high-impact role: you’ll influence product direction, define how we build, and help turn ideas into real, user-facing systems fast.

ROLE OUTLINE

• Experience going from 0 to 1: Own projects end-to-end, from ideation to delivery

• Architect systems: Design scalable backends, frontends, and AI-powered applications

• Build AI into the product: Integrate and operationalize ML models into various aspects of our product stack

• Establish MLOps foundations: Drive infrastructure for Model training, deployment and monitoring

• Collaborate tightly: Work directly with product, design, and data to move fast

• Raise the bar: Improve code quality, CI/CD, developer experience, and reliability

• Manage and mentor: Build, support, unblock, and grow a small team of engineers

• Culture: Nurture a high-performance and agile engineering culture

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• 10+ years of software development experience

• 3+ years of building and shipping modern AI-enabled web applications or platforms in production

• 3+ years of experience deploying and operating ML/AI systems in production

• Experience leading small engineering teams and mentoring engineers while remaining highly hands-on

• Strong full-stack skills (TypeScript, React, Node.js)

• Experience designing scalable APIs and working with production databases, especially PostgreSQL and other SQL systems

• Experience with Docker/containers

• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience

• Solid experience with AWS and owning cloud/platform maturity

• Strong familiarity with MLOps practices, including model lifecycle management, monitoring, deployment, and data/model pipelines

• Comfortable owning ambiguous problems and moving quickly

• Strong product instincts—you care about what gets built, not just how

• Exposure to regulated environments (e.g., healthcare/HIPAA)

PREFERENCES

• Experience in health-tech and can communicate well with science/clinical stakeholders

• Experience in healthcare or a regulated data background is preferred

• Experience interviewing and helping hire strong engineers is preferred; experience building a small team is a plus

• Experience with Kubernetes

• Familiarity with NoSQL/vector/search stores is a plus

WHY JOIN JONA

• Own meaningful problems: Your work will directly shape the product and user experience

• Build with AI at the core: Not a side project—this is central to what we do

• Small team, big impact: Your decisions matter immediately

• Move fast: Minimal bureaucracy, high trust, real ownership

• Full Benefits:

  • Medical, Dental & Vision: Competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents. This includes medical, dental, and vision premiums as well as a company contributed HSA/FSA.

  • Retirement Matching: Jona has a 401k plan that offers company matching for dollars you contribute.

  • Jona’s vacation policy is to take vacation. We operate on a Freedom and Responsibility model of unlimited PTO.

  • Equity: We offer meaningful equity ownership, allowing team members to share directly in the long-term success of Jona.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

• Salary range: $225K - $270K

• Equity