Head of Engineering

Roughly half of this role is standing in front of people and being believed.

You will spend a large part of your week explaining: to a client why their architecture will not hold, to an engineer why the work is not ready, to a room of thirty people how to actually work with AI agents instead of talking about them. Our clients are primarily US customers. They buy confidence as much as capability, and you are frequently the most senior technical person they will ever speak to.

You are also the coach. Training, workshops, and code review as teaching rather than as gatekeeping. The standard only holds if people want to meet it.

If you are the strongest engineer in the room but nobody seeks you out, this is not your role. We are weighting this equally with technical depth, and we will screen for it.

Contracts, invoicing, pricing, and the commercial relationship. Those sit with the Head of Engagements. You two will argue about staffing, and that argument is the point: one of you owns the client, one of you owns the quality, standards and work put out by the engineers.

• 8+ years building software; 3+ years leading engineers directly.
• Experience running engineering across several simultaneous client engagements, or running an in-house org and understanding what changes when the work is someone else's business.
• You still read code and review it. This is not a role where you stop being technical.
• You have hired engineers, and you have let one go. Both matter.
• Comfortable being the person who says the design is wrong, to a client, early.
• Someone people listen to. You can hold a room, teach a workshop, and disagree with a client without losing them.
• AI-native in practice, not opinion: you use coding agents daily and you have specific views on where they break. Much of our work now involves inheriting applications a client's own staff built with AI, with no governance, no security review, and one person who understands them.
• Direct, written communication. Our clients are in the US and much of our team is not, so most decisions are made in writing and read hours later.
• Useful, not required: distributed and offshore team leadership; heavy data and integration work against systems that do not want to be integrated (ERP, unstable APIs, no direct database access); experience taking a services business toward owning a product.