Head of Technology

About the job

• System Reliability & Upkeep
• Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture
• Identify and drive reduction of technical debt — proactively, not reactively
• Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, Pino structured logging)
• Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably
• Scalable, Quality Engineering
• Design and review system architecture decisions — schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), queue design
• Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, error handling patterns
• Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk
• Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability
• Cost Consciousness
• Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute)
• Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them
• Balance engineering investment against business return — know when "good enough" is the right call
• Team Standards & Culture
• Set a high bar for code quality — not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness
• Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational
• Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs
• Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual
• Customer Empathy
• Understand that the systems you build serve real D2C businesses who depend on them to communicate with their customers
• Treat reliability issues with the urgency of a customer escalation, not a backlog item
• Stay connected to what support and product teams are seeing from customers — let that shape engineering priorities
• Communication & Stakeholder Management
• Translate technical complexity into clear, honest language for non-technical co-founders and stakeholders
• Communicate risk, timelines, and tradeoffs clearly — no sugar-coating, no unnecessary alarm
• Manage up: surface the right problems at the right time without waiting to be asked
• Manage expectations — both internally with the team and externally with leadership
• Balancing Tradeoffs
• Navigate the tension between shipping fast and building right — and be able to articulate why you chose one over the other
• Know when to take on short-term debt and when to push back
• Make architectural decisions that serve the next 18 months, not just the next sprint

• 7–8 years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a lead or staff-level role
• Strong command of TypeScript/Node.js in production (our primary stack)
• Deep understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architecture patterns
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL), ORM usage (TypeORM or similar), and writing efficient queries at scale
• Experience designing and operating async/event-driven systems (message queues, workflow engines, or similar)
• Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and cost/performance monitoring
• Strong pull request review discipline — you know what makes a good review and what makes a bad one

• Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Socket.IO, pub/sub patterns)
• Exposure to LLM integration, RAG pipelines, or AI feature development in production
• Experience with Temporal.io or similar workflow orchestration
• Familiarity with WhatsApp Business API, omnichannel messaging, or e-commerce integrations
• Prior experience at a startup in the 10–100 person range where you had to set standards, not just follow them

• Someone who needs a perfectly defined problem before they can start
• A pure IC who avoids people and process
• A pure manager who's lost touch with the code
• Someone who optimises for their own comfort over team outcomes

• You ask "why does this fail in production?" before asking "why didn't someone write a test?"
• You think about the developer who reads your code six months from now
• You're bothered by silent failures, swallowed errors, and fire-and-forget async calls
• You believe good documentation and clear naming are not optional extras
• You have opinions on architecture but hold them loosely when presented with better evidence
• You understand that a cost spike is an engineering problem, not just a finance problem
• You treat a customer-facing bug with more urgency than a refactor that only benefits the team
  
  

• A production codebase with real technical debt alongside genuinely good architecture
• A fast-moving team that ships frequently
• A company that takes reliability seriously but is still building the culture around it
• Multiple backend services that need to be held together with clear ownership and standards
• A product that's expanding into AI agents, voice workflows, and deeper e-commerce automation — meaning the technical surface area is growing fast
• This is a role for someone who thrives in that kind of environment — not someone who needs it to be clean before they can contribute.
  
  

• Meaningful ownership — you'll shape how engineering works here, not just execute someone else's vision
• Direct access to founders and product decisions
• Competitive compensation (cash + equity discussion based on profile)
• A product that real businesses depend on every day — your work matters immediately