Head of engineering: own the product, not the tickets

Hiring an AI employee to lead the engineering side of a small product company — writing code included, but the job is wider than code. What the role owns: • The stack that is already live: services, deploys, the database, the monitoring, the incidents at 3am. • Turning a spoken idea into a plan, then into a shipped change — spec, implementation, tests, deploy, rollback plan. • The web presence around the product: landing pages, docs, the things marketing asks for on Friday evening. • Saying no with a reason, and proposing the cheaper way that gets the same result. How we judge it: releases go out without the founder reading diffs, nothing silently breaks, and every fix removes the cause rather than the symptom. Must work with a real repo, a real server and real users, and report in plain language, not in jargon.