Head of Engineering

Who are we?

We’re a team buildingSagora—an AI for autonomous system design and operations. Sagora understands the characteristics of the workload, adapts to dynamic environments, and continuously optimizes multiple layers of the AI stack to achieve performance and cost objectives. Sagora designs and delivers system optimizations 10-100x faster than experts, reducing weeks of human effort to hours. The technology is based on a decade’s worth of know-how and insights from award-winning research in the Networks and Mobile Systems group at MIT CSAIL.

About the Role

We are looking for a dynamic, highly technical, hands-on Head of Engineering to lead our small but exceptional team of engineers. This is a “player-coach” role for a leader who still loves to dive into the design, architecture, and code with the team, but is equally passionate about (i) driving accountability, (ii) building a high-performance, truth-seeking, can-do culture, and (iii) delivering tangible business results. You will manage the development of our platform that optimizes demanding AI workloads. You will report to Glia AI’s co-founder and CEO, Mohammad Alizadeh, and also work closely with co-founder Hari Balakrishnan, playing a pivotal role in shaping Glia’s technical and organizational future.

Responsibilities

• Lead & scale: Manage and grow a highly productive team of systems and AI engineers, fostering a culture of disciplined rigor without bureaucratic friction.

• Drive execution: Ensure that research-led designs and experiments are implemented in a robust, production-faithful platform that handles complex processing pipelines and heterogeneous hardware infrastructure.

• Engineering execution: Own and execute the engineering roadmap, working closely with the Product and Business leadership of the company.

• Bridge the gap between research and platform: Our work spans the range from research on trustworthy agentic AI to scalable and reliable platform engineering.

Desired Expertise and Experience

• Systems intuition: You have a deep understanding of the entire stack, from model code and serving frameworks (Triton, vLLM) to distributed systems to hardware-specific runtime configurations.

• Robust agentic AI systems: You have experience with agentic AI and a strong desire to build these systems using software and systems engineering principles.

• Leadership depth: Experience managing small, high-performance teams in a fast-paced startup or advanced R&D environment. You know how to drive a team toward milestones while maintaining high software and system quality.

Technical excellence:

• Experience with one or more of cloud systems for AI workloads, GPU optimization, and performance engineering.

• Strong proficiency in Python and AI/ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).

• Expertise in or experience with agentic AI systems.

• Experience with heterogeneous hardware environments and AI/ML pipelines.

• Mission-driven: You believe AI is the ultimate collaborator for discovering new ideas in

• AI-driven systems and are excited to contribute to this mission.

Why Join Glia AI?

• Strong pedigree: Work alongside a team of renowned experts in AI-driven systems.

• Massive impact: Our technology has demonstrated the ability to achieve significant improvements in long-running engineering research and design tasks spanning performance engineering, model pipeline development, and cost optimization..

• Robust financials: Our seed round ($13.5M) closed in September 2025; we’re backed by top-tier VC firms (Pillar, E14, and Neotribe), as well as luminaries like Jeff Dean, Ion

• Stoica, Aparna Chennapragada, Nick McKeown, Srinivas Narayanan, and more. We are in the midst of multiple paid PoCs with marquee customers.

• Solving hard problems: We are solving the fundamental bottlenecks of the AI revolution: quality, performance, and cost.