Head of Product Engineering Full Time

Title: Head of Product Engineering

Department: Product

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

Location: Scottsdale, Arizona

About Wise Pelican
Wise Pelican is hiring a Head of Product Engineering to help us reinvent our software development department as AI-first. You’ll lead a small, high-velocity team of recent graduates, training them in modern vibe coding practices while delivering high-quality, high-impact features that our real estate customers love.

This isn’t about joining an existing team—it’s about building something new. You’ll have full ownership to hire, mentor, and scale a team of talented early-career developers, teaching them to leverage AI tools to ship 10x faster than traditional development teams. From defining product strategy to architecting systems to building robust CI/CD pipelines that automate QA and deployments, you’re going to play a pivotal role in transforming how Wise Pelican builds and ships software.

Wise Pelican is an innovative leader in real estate marketing solutions, empowering real estate professionals with cutting-edge tools and services. As a growing company with a global workforce, we foster a dynamic, inclusive work environment that promotes growth, innovation, and collaboration.

This position is a full-time role located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

What Will You Do?
Build & lead the team: After you get your footing- hire and onboard a small cohort of talented recent-grad developers; mentor them into high-output, product-minded builders; establish best practices for AI-first development using tools like Claude Code and Cursor; and create a culture of shipping, learning, and continuous improvement.

Be your own Product Manager: Define what to build and why, collaborate with customers and stakeholders to identify high-impact opportunities, make trade-offs based on business value and user impact, translate vision into actionable specs, and iterate on real usage metrics.

DevOps & infrastructure: Build and maintain CI/CD that automates testing, QA, and deployments; implement infrastructure-as-code; create monitoring/logging/alerting; and reduce friction so the team can ship multiple times per day.

Hands-on development: Lead by example; architect and build full-stack systems in our Angular + Node.js + MongoDB stack; design RESTful APIs, data models, and AWS cloud infrastructure; set code-quality standards for the AI-assisted era; and run pragmatic code reviews.

What Big Things Will You Own?
At first…

Recruit and hire 2–4 recent-grad developers with raw talent and hunger to learn.

Build CI/CD from the ground up—automate tests through production deploys.

Establish foundational AI-first workflows, tooling, and documentation.

Take ownership of 1–2 major product areas, from strategy to execution.

Partner directly with the CEO to define the vision for the new development culture.

Ship early wins that prove the model works.

Once you get your footing…

Scale your team’s output across multiple product domains.

Drive long-term product strategy and technical architecture decisions.

Build a world-class DevOps culture where shipping should be boring and routine.

Establish Wise Pelican’s reputation for AI-assisted development excellence.

Build a talent pipeline and career ladder for your growing team.

Who Are You?
3–10+ years building and shipping software products with modern practices; able to architect systems from scratch and make pragmatic technical decisions.

An expert vibe coder with extensive hands-on experience using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) and a track record of 5–10x productivity gains.

Proficient with Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, MongoDB; strong with REST APIs, AWS, Docker, and microservices.

Experienced building CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar), automated testing frameworks, and quality gates.

A DevOps-mindset leader who automates everything and cares about observability, reliability, and safe speed.

A natural mentor/teacher who communicates clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and thrives in ambiguity.

Where Can You Easily Impress Us?
You’ve trained others in AI-assisted development or vibe-coding workflows and documented your approach (posts, talks, tutorials).

Portfolio of shipped products built primarily with AI coding assistants; experience leading small, high-velocity teams.

You’ve built sophisticated CI/CD that actually works in production; bonus for IaC (AWS CDK, Terraform, CloudFormation), GIS/mapping exposure (Leaflet, Mapbox, Turf.js), or familiarity with RAG/agentic workflows.

You want to reshape how teams build together. You’re constantly wanting to show others what you’ve shipped and new ways you utilized AI to do it.

What’s In It For You?
Major Medical Insurance: Working at Wise Pelican gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. And happy people just don’t get sick. But…if that does happen, we offer Major Medical Insurance to assist with life’s biggest nuisance.

Dental & Vision Coverage: An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Talking dental and vision insurance, of course. No need for revenge when eyes and teeth are insured.

Paid Time Away: The PTA you want to be involved with. Employees are given 3 weeks of Paid Time Off. Also Sick Time. Also Parental Leave. Also 7 Company Holidays per year. Also—

Professional Development Stipends: “Pay me what you owe me! Don’t act like you forgot! WPBHMM!” —You to Wise Pelican about fronting the bill on your professional development needs (yes, this includes AI tool subscriptions).

401(k) at tenure milestone: We hope you’ll want to stop working here one day. This should help.

Compensation: $120,000–$180,000. Offered compensation is based on experience, demonstrated expertise in AI-assisted development, and leadership capability.