Head of Engineering
About the Role
This is a player-coach Head of Engineering role at an early-stage B2B SaaS company in the construction technology and AI space. You will work directly with the founding team to own the full technical direction, from infrastructure and platform architecture to AI evaluation pipelines, while leading a team of five senior engineers. The role carries real strategic weight and real hands-on coding responsibility in equal measure.
What You'll Do
Own the engineering roadmap end-to-end, including infrastructure choices, architecture evolution, code quality standards, and team processes.
Drive technical vision across core platform capabilities: data lineage, artifact abstractions, document processing at scale, AI evaluation pipelines, and semantic search.
Architect and implement complex features hands-on alongside the team, not just in design reviews.
Make foundational decisions on the AI and full-stack tech stack, spanning TypeScript, Fastify, Python, Postgres, AWS, and OpenAI integrations.
Hire, mentor, and develop a small senior engineering team; define hiring standards and practices that scale.
Build a high-feedback, low-ego engineering culture where engineers take ownership and grow.
Partner directly with founders on product-engineering strategy and represent engineering in investor and customer conversations.
What We're Looking For
Around 10 years of B2B SaaS full-stack development experience, including enterprise contexts.
Proven track record scaling systems across multiple infrastructure iterations and managing technical debt at scale.
Significant engineering leadership experience managing at least one team in a B2B SaaS environment, ideally from early stage (0 to 10 employees) onward.
Fluency in modern web stacks (TypeScript, modern frameworks, backend API design) with solid backend experience in Python.
Experience architecting data pipelines, document processing systems, or similar data-intensive platforms.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including databases, storage, and deployment automation.
Experience integrating AI/ML systems into production applications or evaluating ML model performance.
Exposure to observability and monitoring tooling (such as Datadog or similar) is a plus.
Experience with enterprise system integrations (ERP, procurement platforms, or similar) is a plus.
Founder or entrepreneurial background is a strong plus.
Startup exposure is required; comfort with early-stage ambiguity and a bias for impact over process are essential.
Strong communicator, fluent in written and spoken English.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: EUR 145,000 to EUR 210,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site, five days per week in Berlin, Germany. Candidates must be based in Berlin or willing to relocate.