Remote Ruby Rails Developer Contract Jobs in Long Beach, CA

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Head of Engineering

Full-Time  |  Remote  |  Light Travel (~5%)

Our client is an early-stage, pre-revenue startup building an audience-intelligence platform for the entertainment industry, applying data and machine learning to help predict and improve audience response to creative work across TV and film. Entertainment makes eight- and nine-figure bets on creative material with no systematic way to evaluate it. This is a chance to build that instrument from the inside out, alongside people who operate at the top of the industry. Founded by a small, fast-moving, highly capable team with deep entertainment and media expertise, the company has just closed its funding round and is actively building out its core technology, with early technical infrastructure already in place.

Our client is seeking a hands-on, full-time Head of Engineering to own the architecture and build the core instrument that will power the company's audience-intelligence platform from the ground up. This is the company's first full-time technical hire, reporting directly to the CEO, with the mandate to turn an early conceptual architecture into a working, scalable product.

In the first six months, this person will build a working prototype of the company's core instrument on top of an existing evaluation harness and show, under pre-registered conditions, that it outperforms the baseline that harness already measures. The founding team has established that baseline. Beating it is your mandate.

l  Own instrument architecture end-to-end and build systems designed to scale.

l  Apply machine learning and data science to messy, unstructured, and often subjective human-preference data to identify meaningful behavioral patterns.

l  Design data schemas and scoring frameworks for qualitative, variable inputs where clean structure doesn't already exist.

l  Translate technical concepts clearly for non-technical stakeholders, including supporting the CEO in explaining the technology to prospective clients.

l  Partner closely with the CEO and, eventually, other department heads to shape the product roadmap and define the eventual consumer-facing product and client experience.

l  Begin building a small technical team as the company scales past the initial build; scope any contract engineering needs, own model and API spend, and manage key external vendors.

l  Stay hands-on and flexible as the product and technical direction evolve based on early data and findings.

l  Has previously been a key technical decision-maker at an early-stage company, or a technical co-founder at their own company. 0-to-1 experience building and scaling systems from scratch is essential; strong individual contributors in large organizations who have neither carried final architectural authority nor built 0-to-1 are not a fit.

l  Not currently in a founder or co-founder role at their own company, and available for a full-time permanent commitment.

l  Comfortable operating as a builder rather than primarily an organizational leader; recent experience running a large technical organization is not what this role calls for. This is a lean organization. The role is cross-functional by design and will partner with product and business development functions as they are built out. Management responsibilities will be required but light, at least through the next funding round. This role is operator-forward.

l  Background applying AI/ML to ambiguous, sparse, or subjective data, ideally in a recommendation-engine, matching-system, or behavioral-modeling context.

l  Comfort working with messy, unstructured, or highly variable data, not just clean, well-structured pipelines.

l  Experience with large language models (LLMs) and an interest in creative approaches to categorizing and scoring qualitative data.

l  Fluent in the current research literature on large language models and their known failure modes, and able to articulate when a hosted frontier API is the wrong foundation for a given problem. Opinions, creative thinking, and flexibility around mixture-of-experts architectures, small models, and world models are a plus. 

l  Familiarity with the limits of LLM-generated and LLM-simulated data (variance collapse, training-data contamination, sycophantic response patterns) is a significant advantage.

l  Strong communicator, intellectually honest, rigorous in the work, pragmatic about problems, interested in solutions: willing and able to explain complex technical concepts and to collaborate closely with the CEO, who cares about the reasoning chain, not just the outcome.

l  Entertainment industry background is not required, but genuine excitement about the space is essential: our client pool operates at the highest levels of the industry.

l  Must be authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.

Location:  Remote

Work arrangement:  Full-time, remote; light travel (~5%), including occasional on-site trips

Contract type:  Full-time, permanent

Compensation:  $180,000 base, plus an annual performance bonus of up to 10% of base salary tied to defined company milestones

Equity:  Equity commensurate with a founding technical hire, with specifics finalized at offer

Benefits:  Full benefits package; specifics confirmed at offer

This is a rare opportunity to own the technical foundation of a company solving a genuinely hard, interesting problem at the intersection of creativity and data, with direct access to top-tier relationships across the entertainment industry. The team is lean, smart, and moves fast, with a flat, open-door culture that lets the data shape the product.

This search is being conducted confidentially on behalf of our client by Escalon Recruiting. To apply or learn more, please contact us directly, the identity of the hiring company will be shared with qualified candidates as the process progresses.

recruiting@escalon.services

This is a rare opportunity to own the technical foundation of a company solving a genuinely hard, interesting problem at the intersection of creativity and data, with direct access to top-tier relationships across the entertainment industry. The team is lean, smart, and moves fast, with a flat, open-door culture that lets the data shape the product.

This search is being conducted confidentially on behalf of our client by Escalon Recruiting. To apply or learn more, please contact us directly, the identity of the hiring company will be shared with qualified candidates as the process progresses.

recruiting@escalon.services