Director of Engineering

💻 Job Title: Director of Engineering

🫡 Reporting into: CTO / Co-Founder

💰 Salary: up to ~£200k / €230k (potential flex for strong candidates)

📈 Equity: up to ~0.5%, currently valued at ~€500k (aiming to ~x10 in 3-4 years)

📍 Location: fully remote anywhere in EU or UK

🔐 Company: Cyber Security SaaS start-up building AI agents to identify and resolve cloud vulnerabilities

💸 Funding: $30m+ (Series A)

👥 Employees: ~40 (25 in Engineering)

• structured in high-ownership, rapid-output teams (2-3 engineers each + Squad Lead)

Product context

This rapidly-scaling AI-native cybersecurity start-up is building autonomous AI agents that investigate cloud vulnerabilities, determine exploitability and guide remediation (+working on autonomous remediation as we speak).

Under the hood, that means:

• High-throughput event ingestion
• Cloud-native data infrastructure
• Distributed orchestration systems
• Evaluation and observability pipelines
• Performance-sensitive backend services

The role

We’re hiring a senior technical leader to own the platform side of a engineering - think infrastructure, data systems, core backend foundations.

This is not a coordination role. It is not a process role. It is not a board-reporting leadership job. This is for someone who:

• Has led 15-20+ engineers in a rapidly-scaling start-up
• Managed 3-6 squad leads
• Has built large scale distributed systems
• Understands data platforms deeply
• Still commits code and wants to stay close to tech

🫵 What you’ll be doing:

• Leading high performing data platform/BE teams - you'd start with 3 Squad Leads under you, building that out to ~6 over time
• Stay close to architecture, code and design decisions
• Review code and contribute when needed
• Ensure their data and infrastructure foundations scale with agent workloads
• Drive performance, reliability and developer velocity
• Hire exceptional backend/data/platform engineers
• Develop the next generation of tech leads

You will be measured by: customer impact, system performance, revenue enablement as well as team quality and satisfaction.

✅ Must have requirements:

• Low ego, high empathy & emotional intelligence
• Experience leading remote teams
• Technical credibility - you're not expected to be the strongest programmer in the room, but will be leading world-class talent who needs to respect you (they will interview you)
• Strong software engineering background and ideally a mastery of Python (Rust/Go/Elixir are also fine)
• Strong data platform knowledge (streaming, batch, storage layers, infra design)
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and scalability trade-offs, with experience scaling systems under real load
• Deep AWS expertise
• Proven ability to operate in ambiguity and build from first principles
• Business owner's mindset

👍 Bonus points for:

• Previous experience in big tech/companies moving massive data volumes as well as rapidly scaling start-ups
• Founder or early-stage startup experience, particularly having built an engineering org from a small base.
• Familiarity with AI / Machine Learning infrastructure
• Understanding of / experience with LLMs or AI-agent systems
• Domain expertise in AI and/or Cyber Security, ideally understanding of vulnerability management
• Experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, custom orchestration layers)
• Evaluation frameworks, tracing, observability for LLM systems