Head of Engineering

Job description

Remote | Europe | Full-time About the Company Our client is an international product company operating a portfolio of 11 profitable B2C SaaS products and desktop/mobile applications used by customers worldwide. The products are built fully in-house by a distributed technology organization of approximately 40–60 people. The company is founder-led, fully remote across Europe, and operates with a direct, pragmatic, performance-driven culture. Following a period of aggressive growth, the company is entering its next stage: optimizing execution, product quality, engineering efficiency, and the systems connecting multiple products and business units. About the Role We are looking for a Head of Engineering who thinks like a business owner, not only an engineering leader. You will work closely with the CEO and take ownership of engineering execution across the company's product portfolio. Your job is to make sure technology contributes directly to business performance — through faster delivery, reliable products, strong payment and subscription flows, efficient infrastructure, and an engineering organization focused on outcomes. This is a hands-on leadership role. You should be comfortable moving between business priorities, architecture, infrastructure, product data, and actual implementation. When something important cannot be solved through delegation, you are expected to understand the problem deeply enough to step in and help solve it yourself. Success will be measured by business and engineering outcomes rather than activity: what shipped, what improved, what became faster or more reliable, and what impact engineering had on revenue, product quality, and operational efficiency. What You'll Own Business & Engineering Performance - Translate business priorities into engineering decisions, always considering their impact on revenue, product quality, speed, and company performance. - Partner closely with the CEO on technology and product priorities. - Own engineering KPIs, technology costs, delivery performance, and operational efficiency. - Prioritize initiatives according to measurable business impact rather than internal complexity or process. - Make fast, pragmatic technical decisions and ensure commitments are carried through to completion. - Identify opportunities where technology can improve revenue, conversion, efficiency, or customer experience. Hands-on Delivery - Stay technically close to the products and engineering teams rather than operating only through management layers. - Step directly into technical problems when necessary — whether they involve backend, frontend, full-stack development, infrastructure, or DevOps. - Remove technical and organizational blockers quickly and keep teams focused on shipping. - Challenge unnecessary complexity and simplify processes, systems, and architecture where possible. - Improve development velocity while maintaining a high standard of engineering and product quality. - Build when building is faster and more effective than creating another process or presentation. Product Quality, Monitoring & Data - Establish strong product-health monitoring and alerting across the portfolio. - Ensure visibility into uptime, errors, critical user funnels, payments, subscriptions, and other revenue-impacting signals. - Define which metrics require alerts and make sure critical issues reach the right engineering teams immediately. - Build an operating model where production issues are identified and resolved before they become business problems. - Maintain a high bar for product quality across devices, products, integrations, and user states. - Work comfortably with dashboards and product data and understand where to investigate when business or product metrics change. - Understand how user acquisition, conversion funnels, subscriptions, and payments connect to engineering performance. AI & Engineering Efficiency - Drive practical adoption of AI tools across engineering. - Move beyond experimentation and establish measurable impact from AI on areas such as development velocity, engineering output, automation, or cost. - Define how AI adoption will be measured and continuously evaluate whether it is creating real productivity gains. - Identify additional opportunities to automate engineering workflows and reduce repetitive work. Platform & Product Unification - Improve consistency across the company's portfolio of products. - Ensure critical capabilities such as payments, subscriptions, integrations, monitoring, and infrastructure work reliably across products. - Identify duplicated or fragmented systems and determine where standardization creates meaningful business value. - Work across engineering, product, marketing, payments, customer support, and other functions to understand how technology affects the wider business. - Build systems and processes that can support additional products without unnecessary operational complexity. Team Leadership - Lead a distributed technology organization of approximately 40–60 people across engineering, QA, and DevOps. - Stay close enough to day-to-day execution to understand what teams are working on, where delivery is slowing down, and where intervention is needed. - Build clear accountability around outcomes and commitments. - Coach engineering leaders and individual contributors toward execution, ownership, and product thinking. - Maintain a high hiring bar and ensure engineering quality remains strong as the organization grows. - Recruit and scale the team as new products and technical needs emerge. - Introduce only the delivery rituals and processes that demonstrably improve speed, visibility, or quality. What We're Looking For Must Have - 5+ years in engineering leadership, such as Head of Engineering, CTO, VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, or a comparable role. - Experience in a performance-driven, subscription-monetized B2C product company. - Strong understanding of subscriptions, payments, monetization, and the engineering systems behind them. - Experience building and operating digital products used by customers internationally. - Proven ownership of engineering delivery and measurable improvements in areas such as product performance, reliability, development velocity, revenue impact, or technology cost. - Strong technical background and the ability to remain genuinely hands-on when required. - Solid understanding of modern web architectures and technologies such as Node.js, NestJS, React/Next.js, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and AWS, or closely comparable technologies. - Experience with production infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, reliability, and incident management. - Demonstrated experience introducing AI tools into engineering workflows with practical impact. - Experience leading and scaling distributed or remote engineering teams. - Experience working in fast-moving, founder-led, startup, scale-up, or similarly execution-focused environments. - Strong written and spoken English. The Person We're Looking For You are business-minded and naturally connect engineering decisions to revenue, product performance, and company priorities. You move quickly and are comfortable making decisions without waiting for perfect information or universal consensus. You are technically credible and curious enough to investigate problems yourself rather than relying entirely on reports from the team. You communicate directly, clearly, and without unnecessary complexity. You bring solutions when escalating problems and take ownership until important issues are actually resolved. You are highly structured but pragmatic about process — if a process costs more time than the problem it solves, you simplify it. You remain calm under pressure while treating critical product and revenue issues with urgency. Most importantly, you prefer shipping and measurable improvement over presentations about what could eventually be improved. Why Join - Own engineering across 11 established and profitable B2C products with global users. - Lead a 40–60-person distributed technology organization. - Work directly with the CEO and have significant influence over both technical and business decisions. - Shape the next stage of the company as it moves from aggressive scaling toward smarter optimization. - Work with a modern stack including Node.js, NestJS, Next.js, Kubernetes, and AWS. - Drive meaningful AI adoption across an established engineering organization. - Join a fully remote European company with a pragmatic, direct working culture. - Receive performance-based incentives linked to efficiency and results, with the ability to allocate bonuses across yourself and your team. - 22 paid annual leave days.