Head of Engineering

Engineering

Albuquerque, New Mexico (Remote)

About Us

Firescape™ is a wildfire risk and mitigation software company headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We build cloud-hosted geospatial software that helps utilities manage wildfire risk and resilience. By combining geospatial analytics, remote sensing, and machine learning, we deliver real-time insights that help protect communities and critical assets.

Firescape's mission is to aid utility companies in safeguarding critical infrastructure, and the communities they serve, by proactively managing and mitigating wildfire risks. Firescape was founded by two scientists from Sandia National Labs with deep experience in wildfire science and remote sensing.

The Role

Are you a strategic leader with a passion for building exceptional software and empowering teams to thrive? As our Head of Engineering, you'll have the unique opportunity to shape and implement the strategy for growing our development team, manage capacity, and ensure the right people and resources are in place to succeed. You'll collaborate closely with our CTO and other key stakeholders to bring our product roadmap to life.

This is a leadership role — it's a chance to lead by example, optimize development workflows, and cultivate a culture of innovation, technical excellence, and continuous improvement. This is also a technical role - you'll design and implement scalable APIs and data pipelines, integrate complex spatial data workflows, and ensure the platform is performant, secure, and reliable. You'll mentor junior developers through code reviews and best practices, helping set the technical tone for our growing engineering team.

The ideal candidate has experience designing and deploying backend systems that process geospatial data at scale — and enjoys balancing hands-on coding with guiding others.

Responsibilities

Participate within a fast-growing start-up company with evolving requirements, where ownership and hands-on contribution is expected from every team member.

Success in this role will be measured by: development team throughput, meeting product delivery timelines, stability of the software (bug leakage, performance), growth and employee satisfaction within the team.

You are the Principal Engineer, accountable for outcomes from the software development team.

Play a hands-on role in all aspects of software development, especially in initial stages as the team grows.
The Head of Engineering is expected to actively contribute to coding, architecture, and technical problem-solving, ensuring direct engagement with the codebase and development workflows.
The successful candidate will balance strategic leadership with active technical participation.

Lead a high-performing software development team responsible for building a SaaS application for fixed asset analytics and investment planning.

Demonstrate technical knowledge by providing direction, mentorship, and advice on system design, development, and implementation
Lead and mentor the development team, including performance management and compensation, skills development, and aligning career goals with business objectives. Review PRs and uphold strong engineering standards.
Participate in architecture design and long-term technical planning. Design, develop, and maintain backend services supporting geospatial data storage, processing, and analytics.
Recruit, interview, and onboard to shape the team based on your strategy and company goals
Communicate with leadership to align priorities, manage capacity and expectations, and allocate resources effectively
Foster a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement
Implement best practices for software development to ensure high-quality and scalable software, delivered on time and on budget

Qualifications

10+ years of software development experience, 5+ years in a management role
Leading teams through agile development
Strong proficiency in Python and PostgreSQL/PostGIS
Experience deploying applications in AWS
Hands-on experience with Docker and Docker Compose
Working knowledge of GDAL/OGL and geospatial data formats (GeoTIFF, Shapefile, GeoJSON, etc.)
Experience building RESTful APIs and working with asynchronous systems or microservices
Familiarity with Git and collaborative code review workflows
Proven leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring and guiding engineering teams
Excellent communication skills, able to communicate to technical and non-technical teams

Nice to Have

Experience with large-scale geospatial datasets or cloud-based mapping platforms
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
Generation of MBtiles via Tippecanoe
Experience with FastAPI
Prior startup or small-team experience where you wore multiple hats

What We Offer

Fully remote with an office in Albuquerque
Opportunity to shape the future of a high-impact, mission-driven startup
Flexible work hours (Core working hours 10:00AM to 3:00PM)
Collaborative, fast-moving environment with technical ownership and autonomy
Work on cutting-edge geospatial and environmental technologies that make a real difference
Competitive compensation package
Paid time off and health insurance

Apply Now

Ready to join our team? Submit your application below.