Description review
Head of Engineering
Elayne · New York, New York, US · back to the listing
HR standards
58/100
needs work
Title ↔ description
55/100
needs work
Reads as
Software Architect
93% confident
What this role officially is
software architect — ESCO, the EU occupation classification
Software architects create the technical design and the functional model of a software system, based on functional specifications. They also design the architecture of the system or different modules and components related to the business' or customer requirements, technical platform, computer language or development environment.
Also known as: software architects, software designer, application architect
How others title the same work
Large employers
- Software Architect - Containers / Virtualisation Canonical
- Senior/Staff/Principal Engineer Canonical Ltd.
- Senior Staff Software Engineer - Blockchain Platform Coinbase
- Solutions Architect, Scaled Operations AI Accelerator Team Meta
- Distinguished, Enterprise Architect Salesforce
Startups
- Staff Software Engineer Curri
What the listing never says
- No pay range published. Candidates cannot tell whether applying is worth their time. Pay transparency
- No location or timezone policy stated, so a candidate cannot tell where they may work from. Scope clarity
The listing, marked up
Nothing in the wording of this listing tripped a check. The scores above still judge how complete and coherent it is.
About the role
We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to own the technical foundation of Elayne as we scale from thousands of families to the infrastructure behind how wealth moves between generations.
This is a builder role with company-level technical ownership. You’ll inherit real systems and real constraints, decide what should evolve or be rebuilt, personally ship our hardest systems, and set the engineering standard as we scale.
The hard part of estate settlement isn’t model intelligence. It’s authorization, credentialed access, regulation, and complex logic. Elayne is one of a very small handful of companies ever granted a direct integration with the IRS. Access like that takes years to earn, can’t be replicated by a smarter model, and is the moat you’ll be building on and extending.
You’ll work directly with the CEO and have enormous influence over what Elayne becomes.
If you want to inherit a large team and manage it, this isn’t the role. If you want to build the technical spine of a category-defining company, we’d love to talk.
What you’ll own
•
The estate record: the source of truth connecting people, assets, documents, authority, and actions across an estate
•
Authorization: permissioning that determines who can access and act on highly sensitive financial and legal data
•
Credentialed integrations: IRS, credit bureaus, government systems, and financial institutions, including credential lifecycles, reconciliation, retries, and failure recovery
•
Security and data integrity: encryption, auditability, access controls, provenance, and systems designed for data that has to be right
•
Engineering quality: the architecture, standards, and technical judgment the team is built around
•
The team: help recruit exceptional engineers while remaining deeply hands-on yourself
A wrong output here can mean a rejected court filing, a missed asset, a foreclosed home, or weeks of delay for a grieving family. Correctness isn’t a QA metric, it’s part of our architecture.
Who we’re looking for
• You’re a builder first. Expect the large majority of your time, for at least the first 18 months, to be spent designing systems and shipping code
• You’ve owned production systems involving sensitive or regulated data, ideally fintech, identity, health, credentialing, or another correctness-critical environment
• You’re exceptional at backend architecture, relational data modeling, APIs, and distributed systems
• You’ve integrated with difficult third-party systems and know authentication, retries, reconciliation, and ugly edge cases are the real work
• You’ve been accountable for consequential technical decisions and can explain what you got right and what you got wrong
• You have strong opinions without needing to win the argument
• You want unusually large ownership and are comfortable with the responsibility that comes with it
How we work
We’re small, fast, and close to the people using what we build. Product decisions can start with a family conversation, a rejected filing, an institutional edge case, or something we had to do manually that software should absorb next.
Everyone here owns outcomes, not tickets. We communicate directly, move quickly, and care deeply about impact and getting the details right.
Location & compensation
Office in NoMad, NYC
$250,000 to $320,000 + meaningful equity
Medical, dental, and vision insurance + 401(k)
Equal opportunity
Elayne is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants based on ability, experience, and potential, and do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic under applicable federal, state, or local laws.
We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to own the technical foundation of Elayne as we scale from thousands of families to the infrastructure behind how wealth moves between generations.
This is a builder role with company-level technical ownership. You’ll inherit real systems and real constraints, decide what should evolve or be rebuilt, personally ship our hardest systems, and set the engineering standard as we scale.
The hard part of estate settlement isn’t model intelligence. It’s authorization, credentialed access, regulation, and complex logic. Elayne is one of a very small handful of companies ever granted a direct integration with the IRS. Access like that takes years to earn, can’t be replicated by a smarter model, and is the moat you’ll be building on and extending.
You’ll work directly with the CEO and have enormous influence over what Elayne becomes.
If you want to inherit a large team and manage it, this isn’t the role. If you want to build the technical spine of a category-defining company, we’d love to talk.
What you’ll own
•
The estate record: the source of truth connecting people, assets, documents, authority, and actions across an estate
•
Authorization: permissioning that determines who can access and act on highly sensitive financial and legal data
•
Credentialed integrations: IRS, credit bureaus, government systems, and financial institutions, including credential lifecycles, reconciliation, retries, and failure recovery
•
Security and data integrity: encryption, auditability, access controls, provenance, and systems designed for data that has to be right
•
Engineering quality: the architecture, standards, and technical judgment the team is built around
•
The team: help recruit exceptional engineers while remaining deeply hands-on yourself
A wrong output here can mean a rejected court filing, a missed asset, a foreclosed home, or weeks of delay for a grieving family. Correctness isn’t a QA metric, it’s part of our architecture.
Who we’re looking for
• You’re a builder first. Expect the large majority of your time, for at least the first 18 months, to be spent designing systems and shipping code
• You’ve owned production systems involving sensitive or regulated data, ideally fintech, identity, health, credentialing, or another correctness-critical environment
• You’re exceptional at backend architecture, relational data modeling, APIs, and distributed systems
• You’ve integrated with difficult third-party systems and know authentication, retries, reconciliation, and ugly edge cases are the real work
• You’ve been accountable for consequential technical decisions and can explain what you got right and what you got wrong
• You have strong opinions without needing to win the argument
• You want unusually large ownership and are comfortable with the responsibility that comes with it
How we work
We’re small, fast, and close to the people using what we build. Product decisions can start with a family conversation, a rejected filing, an institutional edge case, or something we had to do manually that software should absorb next.
Everyone here owns outcomes, not tickets. We communicate directly, move quickly, and care deeply about impact and getting the details right.
Location & compensation
Office in NoMad, NYC
$250,000 to $320,000 + meaningful equity
Medical, dental, and vision insurance + 401(k)
Equal opportunity
Elayne is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants based on ability, experience, and potential, and do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic under applicable federal, state, or local laws.