Head of Engineering

Why Now

2026 has been a breakout year for Doppler. We’ve helped over 78,000 startups and enterprises manage their secrets at scale, and landed our first million-dollar customer. We've shipped some of our most exciting features yet, expanded our customer base, and sharpened our focus like never before. With a strong foundation in community, we're scaling and monetizing with ambitious goals across product, growth, sales, and hiring. The momentum is real and we’re just getting started.

About Doppler

Doppler's mission is to make it easy and secure for software developers of every experience level and teams of any size to manage their app configuration and secrets. But hasn't this been done?

Developers tend to be either struggling with the manual management of .env files, or wrestling with an overly complex secrets manager that's not built for software development. The rise of AI tooling has fundamentally expanded who and what has access to your secrets. The stakes have never been higher, and getting it wrong has real consequences. Doppler is the solution to fix this. Simple to adopt, easy to scale, and built for developers, by developers.

Our team is entrepreneurial, with a bias for action. We never back down from a spirited debate and believe we are all responsible for exploring the hard questions. We value self-awareness and meaningful impact. We are open to unconventional approaches and have learned not to judge a book by its cover. Your time is your most valuable resource, so you set your hours. We use Slack to communicate and default to zero meetings. We aim to document everything. We also recommend you invest your time in 10% compounding time.

Who We Are

Doppler is a developer-first secrets management platform that enables engineers and security teams to securely store their secrets across any cloud infrastructure or deployment environment at scale.

The Role

At Doppler, security is our product which means the engineering bar here is high.

You'll be Doppler's new Head of Engineering, reporting directly to the CEO, Amber Britton. This isn't a role where you step in to manage from above. You'll be a technical leader first: in the architecture decisions, in the code reviews, in the on-call conversations. The management layer comes with the territory and not instead of the craft. As a member of Doppler's leadership team, you'll have a seat at the table on company-wide decisions, not just engineering ones.

In the near term, you'll own three things that matter most right now: accelerating product velocity, expanding Doppler's product surface area, and iterating on our on-prem offering as we go deeper into enterprise. Longer term, you'll grow and shape the engineering org as Doppler scales.

About the Team

Doppler’s Engineering is a team comprised of Full-Stack/Product, Data, Growth, and Infrastructure Engineers. We’re a security-first team that genuinely cares about the quality of what we build. We collaborate with as little ego as humanly possible and are constantly trying to improve how we work and deliver software.

What you’ll do:

Technical leadership

• Own and evolve Doppler's technical direction: architecture, system design, security, infrastructure, and the tradeoffs that shape how we build

• Own the engineering roadmap in close partnership with the CEO and product, translating company priorities into what gets built and in what order

• Stay hands-on: you can review code on day one and do so regularly; the team shouldn't wonder whether you understand what they're building

• Lead architectural decisions on our overall product, including on-prem and cloud-based offerings, deployment models, upgrade paths, and the tradeoffs of running Doppler inside a customer's infrastructure

Velocity and execution

• Make the team faster by removing friction, improving tooling, and creating the conditions for focused, high-output work

• Lead the strategy and adoption of AI development

• Keep execution sharp across sprints and longer-horizon initiatives: clear priorities, unblocked engineers, and consistent delivery

Team and culture

• Grow and hire exceptional engineers who raise the bar. You know what great looks like and you're honest about gaps

• Build a remote engineering culture that's high-trust, high-ownership, and low-ego: people should do some of their best work here

• Establish engineering standards for code quality, incident response, on-call, and system design that are rigorous without being bureaucratic

Cross-functional

• Work closely with sales and customer success on enterprise technical requirements

• Partner with stakeholders on security posture. You understand that at Doppler, the security of our systems is inseparable from the product promise we make to customers

• Contributing to company strategy alongside the CEO, representing the engineering perspective in business decisions, and helping shape how Doppler thinks about product direction and market positioning at the leadership level

What you’ll bring to the table:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading engineering teams at startup scale

• Hands-on coding proficiency: you can read a PR, spot an architectural issue, and have a technical opinion on day one

• A track record of shipping security-sensitive infrastructure products. You understand what it means to build systems people trust with credentials, keys, and secrets

• Demonstrated ability to improve velocity at a growing company where you've made teams faster

• Professional experience with AI-assisted development tools, not just personal use

• The instincts of a player-coach: you know when to lead from the front, when to delegate, and when to get out of the way

• Strong communication skills with the CEO and non-technical stakeholders showing you can translate technical strategy into business terms

• Comfort with ambiguity and resource constraints: you've built things without a full team, a full roadmap, or a full playbook

What we are not looking for:

This role isn't right for someone who hasn't written code recently and doesn't plan to. It's not right for someone whose instinct is to add unnecessary structure and process to a small team that needs to move fast. And it's not right for someone who treats security as a blocker rather than a feature because at Doppler, those two things have to coexist.

Preferred experience:

• Knowledge and passion for security-first engineering.

• Experience with distributed systems.

• Prior experience operating at the exec or leadership team level.

• On-prem or self-hosted product experience.

• Strong DevOps/backend experience.

• Developer tools or infrastructure company background.

Benefits

• Equity at an early-stage, fast-growing startup

• Premium health insurance (medical, dental, vision)

• Guilt Free Unlimited PTO - 3-week minimum strongly encouraged!

• Upward Mobility

• Learning and Development Stipend

• Wealth Advisor

• 401k

• Pregnancy & Family Leave

• Fertility & Adoption Benefits

• Equal Compensation (regardless of gender or race)

For a full list of our benefits check our Perks Notion Page.

Closing

We've built a great product our customers love. Our churn is low, and active usage continues to rise. We just need to amplify our reach to educate the market that secrets management can be fast, secure, and affordable for teams and organizations of any size. And most importantly, we need to continue encouraging Developers to stop adhering to archaic insecure standards such as manually managing .env file formats.

Are you passionate about developer-focused products and ready to join an amazing team? Then we want to hear from you!

A final note - we highly encourage you to apply for this role, even if you don't feel entirely qualified, or entirely sure. You never know!