Head of Engineering

Quick Facts

• Role: Head of Engineering (Remote, EU)
• Focus: End-to-end delivery ownership (team, releases, quality, communication)
• Reporting line: CEO

Description

Lead engineering delivery for a hosting control panel used by providers running large server fleets. Own the release process, day-to-day team execution, quality gates, and production incident communication, while also coding 30–50% of the time. Work with an AI-native, agent-based development workflow and provide weekly status to the CEO.

Responsibilities

• Run a fixed release cadence with code freeze and go/no-go decisions; move unfinished work to the next release.
• Plan and manage work sequencing and deadlines so the team executes against the plan without waiting.
• Enforce quality: staging, testing, and a release gate; block releases with open High/Highest issues.
• Define and meet an SLA for production fixes and communicate incidents clearly.
• Create release scope and estimates; maintain accountability for delivering the plan.
• Provide weekly status to the CEO: shipped items, slips, reasons, and risks.
• Adopt an AI-native workflow with a shared standard for agent-based development.
• Participate hands-on in coding (30–50% of time).
• Hire and onboard as the team grows.

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering (PHP/Laravel strongly preferred).
• Solid Linux systems knowledge: packages, services, nginx, PHP-FPM, permissions, updates.
• 2+ years leading a small engineering team with delivery responsibility.
• Experience shipping self-hosted/on-premise software to thousands of customer machines.
• Daily, serious use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar) on a large production codebase, including running parallel agents and merging outputs.
• Ability to provide strong repo context/specs to agents for consistent results.
• Ability to identify where AI-generated code fails (security, permissions, data migrations, system-level code).
• Build guardrails using generated tests, CI blocking merges, and AI-assisted review before human review.
• Ability to measure actual throughput gains.
• Hosting industry knowledge: cPanel/Plesk/DirectAdmin, WHMCS or Blesta, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed, Imunify360, shared vs VPS vs bare metal, migrations, account isolation, mail and DNS.
• Clear written English for mostly async communication.
• 2+ years leading with accountability for both people and deadlines; experience with missed deadlines, underperformance, and conflicting priorities.

Benefits

• Full ownership of engineering for a product used by hosting providers worldwide.
• Direct access to the CEO, with no layers.
• Remote role requiring EU timezone overlap.
• B2B contract with competitive compensation.