Head of Engineering

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Head of Engineering based in Spain.

As Head of Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction, performance, and culture of a fast-scaling product organization. You will lead and grow a highly skilled engineering team while remaining deeply hands-on in software development and architecture decisions. This role combines strategic leadership with strong technical execution, requiring you to guide system design, ensure delivery excellence, and uphold security, privacy, and scalability standards. You will work closely with executive leadership to align engineering priorities with product and customer needs, while fostering a culture of speed, ownership, and continuous improvement. This is a high-impact role for a leader who thrives in fast-moving environments and enjoys solving complex technical challenges alongside their team. You will directly influence engineering quality, team development, and the long-term success of the platform.

• Lead the engineering organization by defining technical direction, ensuring high performance, and maintaining strong delivery standards across all teams.
• Remain actively hands-on with software development (primarily TypeScript, Go, and related technologies), contributing to architecture and critical system design decisions.
• Own system architecture decisions and act as final decision-maker for technical trade-offs, scalability, and robustness.
• Build, mentor, and develop engineering teams, ensuring continuous growth of individual contributors into senior technical or leadership roles.
• Define and evolve engineering processes, standards, and best practices across the software development lifecycle.
• Ensure consistent delivery of high-quality, secure, and scalable software aligned with SLA, privacy, and compliance requirements.
• Drive hiring strategy, define team structure, and recruit top engineering talent in collaboration with People teams.
• Foster a high-performance engineering culture focused on speed, ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with executive leadership (CEO, Product, CISO, Customer Success) to align technical execution with business and customer priorities.
• Oversee application security, infrastructure reliability, and compliance readiness in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
• Identify technical opportunities for innovation, automation, and AI-driven engineering acceleration.
• Manage engineering costs, tooling decisions, and external vendor relationships to ensure operational efficiency.
• Participate in key customer and technical discussions when required to support product direction and solution design.
• Lead AI adoption strategy within engineering to improve development velocity and automation.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including multiple years in technical leadership or engineering management roles.
• Strong hands-on development experience across full-stack systems, ideally with TypeScript, Go, or similar modern programming languages.
• Proven track record of building and scaling end-to-end software products, ideally in SaaS or platform environments.
• Deep understanding of system architecture, APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), and distributed systems.
• Experience leading engineering teams in fast-paced, product-driven environments with a strong delivery focus.
• Demonstrated ability to remain hands-on technically while leading and mentoring teams.
• Strong experience in hiring, structuring, and developing high-performing engineering organizations.
• Solid understanding of security, privacy, compliance, and operational excellence in production systems.
• Strong product and customer orientation, with experience collaborating directly with stakeholders or clients.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a pragmatic, execution-focused mindset.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure, scalability challenges, and modern DevOps practices.
• Strong communication skills in English, with the ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in remote, distributed teams and fast-changing startup environments.
• Experience with AI-driven engineering practices, automation, or developer productivity tooling is a strong plus.

Benefits

• Fully remote position with global flexibility.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Choice of preferred work hardware.
• Discretionary paid time off for rest and personal balance.
• Access to healthcare benefits depending on location.
• Opportunity to work on high-impact, cutting-edge technical challenges.
• Strong focus on engineering autonomy, ownership, and innovation.
• Team retreats and international offsites.
• Supportive, high-performance culture with strong emphasis on learning and growth.
• Opportunity to shape the engineering organization and product at a foundational level.