Head of Engineering

What We're Looking For

We are looking for a Head of Engineering, based in our Bangkok office, to lead the team building Zaapi's AI-first Helpdesk and AI Agent. This role sits close to the centre of the company - working with the executive, Product, and Commercial leads to shape strategy and roadmap, and then getting hands-on to help turn those plans into shipped product.

Our product has two halves that need to work as one. The Helpdesk is where merchants run their day-to-day customer conversations across every channel their buyers use - WhatsApp, LINE, Facebook, Instagram, Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop and Shopify. The AI Agent is where those conversations get resolved automatically: retrieving the right knowledge, following the merchant's own procedures, and taking real actions inside marketplaces and storefronts on the merchant's behalf.

Because the AI Agent is the core of the product, you will need real depth in how modern AI systems are built and run in production. You should have built and deployed agentic applications yourself, and be able to form your own view on architecture, tooling, and where these systems fail once real merchants depend on them.

This is a player-coach role, and both halves are real. You will lead a small team of experienced engineers and keep them unblocked, and you will also be in the codebase every day - from small bug fixes to complex, full-stack agentic features. As we onboard more enterprise customers, you will also own the technical side of how we operate: architecture that scales, third-party integrations, and our security certifications.

If you want to lead engineering on an AI product that does real work for real businesses, stay hands-on while you do it, and grow with a fast-scaling AI startup, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership: Lead a small team of experienced engineers, keeping them unblocked and enabling them to deliver valuable, reliable product features.
• Hands-On Delivery: Work as an individual contributor alongside the team. From small bug fixes to complex, full-stack agentic features, you'll be hands-on every day.
• Technical Architecture: Bring deep technical expertise to high-level architectural decisions, choosing tools and solutions that are proven to scale with the business.
• AI-Assisted Development: Shape how the development team works with AI, and explore how AI-assisted development can improve the team's speed, quality, and effectiveness.
• Integrations Ownership: Manage third-party integrations, including monitoring API changes and deprecations, completing security reviews, and raising support tickets.
• Security & Compliance: Take ownership of Zaapi's ongoing and future security certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) as we onboard more enterprise customers.
• Strategy & Prioritisation: Partner closely with the executive, Product, and Commercial teams to shape strategy, roadmap, and priorities.

Location

• Bangkok (Hybrid - in office 3 days a week)
• Office near Thonglor BTS station

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience managing software engineering teams building customer-facing products, ideally in a startup environment
• Recent experience as an individual contributor, with deep expertise in at least one vertical: frontend, backend, or infrastructure
• You've built and deployed agentic applications into production, not just worked with AI tools
• Familiarity with most of the following: TypeScript, MongoDB, AWS, Vercel, OpenSearch, NestJS, and React
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building and operating complex, real-time applications that are mission-critical to thousands of businesses
• Experience managing or contributing to security certifications and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Flexible Benefit: USD 600 per year
• Hybrid working (3 office days/week)
• 14 days of annual leave
• International working environment

About Us

Zaapi (https://www.zaapi.com) is the AI Customer Experience (CX) platform designed for the modern era of commerce.

Backed by Global Founders Capital, Flash Ventures, Partech, Flourish Ventures, Tekton Ventures, 1982 Ventures, Iterative VC, Kaya Founders and other leading global investors.