Lab4U is looking for a Head of AI & Engineering

About Lab4U

Lab4U is an ed-tech startup democratizing access to quality STEM education. We turn smartphones into pocket labs and equip teachers to deliver rigorous, inquiry-based STEM classes, giving students hands-on science wherever they are. We reach the inflection point where great STEM experiences can change a young person’s career path, across Latin America and now the United States. In a world where AI is changing everything, we want students and teachers to have AI-proof solutions. (See Lab4U on the World Economic Forum).

Lab4U Team 

At Lab4U, we take our mission seriously with passion and fun. Lab4U has a friendly, young, diverse, and international work culture where our community is at the center. Changing the world is fun yet demanding, and we love to pursue our dreams with a strong commitment to education. We are a multidisciplinary team composed of scientists, software engineers, and educators (Get to know our team). We are looking for proactive team members, passionate about changing the world.

Lead the operation of an EdTech entering its next stage of growth

Lab4U is entering a new chapter following its integration with Britebound, a U.S.-based organization focused on expanding educational opportunities for young people at scale. In this context, the company is seeking its next Head of AI & Engineering, who will be responsible for owning Lab4U’s AI transformation, setting the technical architecture for growth across Latin America and the United States, and raising the AI fluency of the entire organization. This person will be the company’s most senior technical leader: hands-on every day, building production AI systems while developing and growing the engineering team that builds them.

Job Description

Reports to: CEO

Works closely with: Head of Product & Learning 

You will be Lab4U’s most senior technical leader. You will set the architecture, ship production AI systems, manage and grow a team of developers, and help the entire organization work smarter with AI.

You will be hands-on every day. You will also be the manager your team needs (running 1:1s, unblocking developers, and raising the technical floor across the team).

The right person for this role is energized by both: they want to build something real AND develop the people around them. 

At Lab4U, we are looking for a Head of AI and Engineering with strategic vision, strong technical skills, and a passion for leadership to guide our Technology team in building impactful educational products. This role combines technical depth with the ability to support, mentor, and empower team members.

What You’ll Own

1. AI Strategy, Systems, and Adoption

You will own Lab4U’s AI transformation across product, technology, operations, and internal workflows. This means not only building AI-powered features, but also defining where AI creates real value, how it should be evaluated, and how teams across the organization should use it responsibly.

Examples of what this includes:

  • Design and deploy Lab4U’s AI roadmap across product, operations, and learning experiences.
  • Build hands-on prototypes, agents, automations, and internal AI tools.
  • Introduce agentic workflows, RAG systems, and AI-assisted processes where they create measurable value.
  • Establish AI governance practices, including privacy, safety, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop processes, and responsible use guidelines.
  • Make AI adoption measurable, ensuring that AI initiatives are not just launched, but actually used and embedded in day-to-day work.

2. Organizational AI Fluency

You will raise the AI fluency of the entire organization, helping technical and non-technical teams understand how to use AI effectively, safely, and practically in their work.

Examples of what this includes:

  • Run practical AI workshops, trainings, and office hours for non-technical teams.
  • Create simple playbooks, workflows, and examples so every team can use AI in their daily work.
  • Support teams in identifying repetitive, manual, or high-friction processes that can be improved with AI.
  • Promote a culture where AI is treated not as a novelty or isolated feature, but as a new way of working.

3. Technical Architecture and Platform Scalability

You will own the technical direction of Lab4U’s platforms, ensuring that our architecture is scalable, maintainable, secure, and ready to support growth in Latin America and the United States.

Examples of what this includes:

  • Define and evolve Lab4U’s technical stack, currently including NestJS, Angular, native mobile, and Azure.
  • Participate actively in system architecture decisions, ensuring scalability, maintainability, observability, and security.
  • Evaluate infrastructure needs as Lab4U grows in the U.S. market.
  • Identify and manage technical risks, proposing mitigation plans and proactive solutions.
  • Reduce technical debt systematically and make its business impact visible to stakeholders.
  • Strengthen DevOps, CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and cloud practices.
  • Evaluate new tools, frameworks, and technical trends with sound judgment.

4. Engineering Quality, Standards, and Delivery

You will ensure that the technology team ships high-quality software with clear standards, strong collaboration, and sustainable development practices.

Examples of what this includes:

  • Set engineering standards for code quality, architecture decisions, documentation, PR reviews, and technical debt management.
  • Lead and improve code review practices across the team’s different stacks.
  • Optimize agile workflows, ceremonies, and collaboration rituals.
  • Accelerate experimentation cycles while maintaining quality and reliability.
  • Support the team in balancing speed, quality, maintainability, and business priorities.
  • Ensure that technical delivery is aligned with product goals and stakeholder expectations.

5. Team Leadership, Mentorship, and Talent Development

You will lead the day-to-day work of the Technology team, creating the conditions for developers to do their best work while supporting their growth, motivation, and wellbeing.

Examples of what this includes:

  • Manage the team through 1:1s, weekly meetings, ongoing mentorship, and continuous support.
  • Unblock developers so they can focus on building and shipping.
  • Mentor developers and foster a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and technical excellence.
  • Lead the full cycle for interns and junior profiles, including sourcing, interviews, hiring, onboarding, management, and development.
  • Participate in technical hiring processes for new members of the Technology team.
  • Build a team culture where people feel supported, challenged, and accountable.

6. Product, Business, and Engineering Alignment

You will act as the bridge between Product & Learning, Business, stakeholders, and Engineering, translating strategic priorities into clear technical direction and helping the organization make better technology decisions.

Examples of what this includes:

  • Translate business and product goals into technical priorities and execution plans.
  • Manage team capacity and help stakeholders understand tradeoffs.
  • Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Education, and other areas to ensure technical solutions are aligned with Lab4U’s goals.
  • Make technical debt, infrastructure needs, and engineering constraints visible in business terms.
  • Help the organization make grounded decisions about what to build, when to build it, and how to build it well.

What We’re Looking For

Must Have

  • 7+ years of experience building technology products.
  • 3+ years deploying AI systems, AI-enabled workflows, or AI-powered products in real environments.
  • Startup experience (or similar), with the ability to do more with less and move quickly without losing judgment.
  • Proven experience managing, mentoring, and supporting developers.
  • Strong proficiency with Claude and the Anthropic ecosystem.
  • Strong skills in prompt engineering, context engineering, agentic systems, RAG, and AI-assisted development workflows.
  • Hands-on experience with Python, APIs, SQL, and cloud environments.
  • Experience with cloud services such as Azure, AWS, or GCP; Azure preferred.
  • Ability to understand and supervise complex technical stacks, including NestJS, Angular, native mobile, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Experience designing scalable, maintainable software architectures.
  • Experience with observability, monitoring, and logging for production systems.
  • Knowledge of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Strong Git practices and experience with collaborative development workflows.
  • Experience with agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban, and project management tools.
  • Experience with AI developer tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Windsurf, GitHub, n8n or Zapier, and LangGraph.
  • Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Ability to make grounded technical decisions that balance quality, speed, risk, and technical debt.
  • A quality-oriented mindset focused on continuous improvement and the use of AI to improve team efficiency.
  • Professional English. You will collaborate regularly with our U.S.-based Britebound team and participate in design sprints, hackathons, and strategic discussions in English.

Strongly Preferred 

  • Experience teaching, training, or enabling non-technical teams on AI.
  • Mobile development exposure, especially Android and/or iOS.
  • Experience managing mobile development teams.
  • Knowledge of infrastructure as code, or IaC
  • Edtech experience..

What Success Looks Like at 12 Months

  • Lab4U has a clear, active, and measurable AI roadmap.
  • Launched new product features or internal AI systems that are live and generating value.
  • AI is meaningfully embedded in the daily workflows of multiple teams.
  • Manual operational work has been significantly reduced through automation and better internal tools.
  • The Technology team is shipping faster, with more confidence and clearer engineering standards.
  • Technical debt is being managed systematically and communicated clearly to stakeholders.
  • Lab4U’s technical architecture is better prepared to scale with growth in the U.S. market.
  • Developers feel supported, unblocked, and clear about priorities, expectations, and technical direction.


Benefits

Why Join Lab4U

You will have real ownership. You will help shape the technical and AI foundations of a company reaching students across Latin America and the United States.

This is a role for someone who wants to build, lead, teach, and transform. You will work alongside a mission-driven team that moves fast and cares deeply about impact. You will help define how Lab4U uses AI not only as a product feature, but as a new organizational capability.

You will be the person who helps turn AI into a practical, measurable, and responsible advantage for the whole company.

📧To apply for the role, email your CV to jp.psyconection@gmail.com with the subject “Application for Head of AI & Engineering”.