Head of Engineering

Oliva is the employee mental wellbeing platform for companies who want to properly care for their people, and help them grow. By combining proper therapy courses, coaching (the good kind), dedicated support for managers, and mental fitness classes—all led by a curated team of top professionals—Oliva helps employees respond to whatever hurdles life throws at them: big or small, at work and beyond.

We've raised funding from two of Europe's best venture capital firms and various top-notch angels. And now, we're looking for a top-notch Head of Engineering to embark on this journey with us.

In this role, you’ll have a unique opportunity to build our engineering machine almost from scratch. This isn’t just any engineering job, though. The bigger impact you have in your role, the more of an impact you make towards our mission—to get high-quality, employer-funded mental healthcare into the hands of millions of people.

Our existing team is lean but very talented, having already laid the foundations of an efficient and fast engineering process. They’re building software and maintaining scalability through an impact-led and collaborative approach. And now we’re looking for a one-of-a-kind engineering leader to help take things up a notch. You will attract top talent, motivate our existing team, and lead by example with your hands-on approach.

As part of the founding engineering team, you’ll be ready to roll your sleeves up in the short term but will leverage your engineering leadership experience to develop and execute the long-term strategic product & engineering vision. In short, you’ll help us build an impact-led/crafted product—not just build features.

You’ll make an impact in the following areas:

• Leadership: From day one, you’ll create a legacy that we can all look back on and be proud of. You will be the driving force behind the engineering strategy that enables Oliva to become Europe’s #1 workplace mental health solution. As well as leading and developing our current team, you’ll hire the next generation of Oliva’s engineering team. You will lead by example, ensuring your team has balance and boundaries. You will continue to build the culture within our engineering team, with a bottom-up non-parental approach, keeping craft and speed at our core.
• Ownership: With the support of your team, you will become the main point of contact regarding engineering at Oliva. You will compile and understand metrics and monitoring that give a comprehensive overview of the engineering team's performance and bottlenecks. You will constantly ensure engineering teams are well-oiled, helping out with processes, toolings, responsibilities, and recruiting.
• Coaching: Bringing your previous hands-on experience, you’ll empower our software engineers and platform engineers, enabling them to be successful and motivated every day they come to work. You won’t just watch, you will dive in on specs, write RFCs, challenge solutions and training by doing. Whilst respecting everyone’s individual style, you’ll encourage knowledge sharing, mentorship, and of course celebrating success.
• Collaboration: Right now, Engineering works very closely with the rest of the org (namely Sakes, Marketing, Product, and Care). You’ll build on this by breaking down walls and not building them up. You’ll think of new ways to encourage everyone in the team to feel like they can contribute to Engineering, no matter their function. You will also spot bottlenecks organization-wide or gaps that might affect the organisation’s engineering efficiency and define processes to improve them.
• Product mindset: From your previous startup experiences, you value building products that really impact users, not just features. You’ll focus on the why more than the what and constantly seek on building delightful/impactful experiences for users. You’ll embrace the incremental loop of lean product building in a startup: build small, measure, learn, iterate, …
• Craft: Aligned with our values, you’ll put craft in anything you and your team do. In particular, within the engineering team, you enable and push the entire organization for quality and pragmatism. You advocate for the adoption of good practices, and best patterns and you maintain engineering craft through code reviews and architecture reviews, …
• Recruiting: Bringing your team-building experience, you’ll anticipate the skills gaps, and maintain a well-balanced engineering team constantly aligned with our business goals. You’ll foster an externally recognized engineering culture praised by current and future engineers. You’ll design hiring processes that are fair, inclusive, and diverse and help raise the bar.
• Security: From day one, we take extremely seriously the security of the data we own. You’ll take a big part in this accountability by spreading the importance of information security company-wide and guaranteeing world-class product security. You will ensure our data security at Oliva is faultless and make it visible externally (website, certifications, blog, ..).
• Self-development: Although you’re not a beginner, you’ll come to us with a beginner’s mindset—open and willing to take on new challenges and learn at a rapid pace. You’ll know how to push yourself outside your comfort zone whilst also having the emotional maturity to know when to ask for help. By joining us at this stage, you’re going to be part of the founding team of something very big and very meaningful.

In case you´re wondering, our current stack is made up of:

• A love for Typescript
• Backend: GraphQL
• AWS (Aurora RDS, Fargate, S3, Lambdas…), deployed using IaC tools such as Terraform
• Data: Airbyte, Snowflake, DBT
• Frontend: NextJS, TailwindCSS, Relay
• Test: Jest, React Testing Library, Playwright
• Monitoring: Sentry, DataDog, Cloudwatch
• BI/Analytics: Metabase, Amplitude, Intercom

Requirements

As our very first engineering leader, you’ll be laying the foundations for how Oliva builds products—for many years to come. You’ll have experience building out a high-performing engineering org in one of the top SaaS names out there and are now looking to leverage that experience to become a pivotal part of a mission-led startup with huge ambitions.

If we ask your previous team members, they’ll tell us that they owe a big part of their development and success to your leadership. You are very familiar with the fast-paced, VC-backed startup environment and are able to wear a few hats—from engineering operations, hands-on building, recruitment, and strategy. You bring equal parts talent and humility (one isn’t enough without the other). You love feedback (giving it and receiving it) and are ready to join us on a journey of self-development, company success, personal success—and of course—success in achieving our important mission.

You’ll be successful if you:

• Experience in a top B2B SaaS company leading engineering
• People leadership experience of staff engineers, senior engineers, platform/DevOps engineers
• Have proven experience building, mentoring, and growing engineering team
• Experience in a Series A-C VC-funded startup
• Have proven experience building impact-led products with speed and craft
• Have proven experience dealing with sensitive data at scale and relevant certifications (ISO, GDPR, HIPAA)
• Previously held the responsibility of setting objectives aligned with business goals and managing engineering stakeholders
• You have had hands-on engineering startup experience in your career, and you are not afraid to roll your sleeves up to mentor your team to be world-class and keep up-to-date with the technology side of things
• Have the unlimited ambition to make Oliva successful

Benefits

We come to work each day knowing that we're contributing to a truly meaningful mission: to improve the mental health of millions of people worldwide.

On top of this, you get:

• A healthy salary and early-employee stock options in a rapidly growing startup
• Plenty of paid time off to relax and recharge your batteries
• Private medical insurance or healthcare allowance
• Free therapy—and encouragement to take advantage of it
• Professional learning & development opportunities to help you grow
• A remote working allowance or co-working membership
• Financial coaching
• Monthly wellbeing allowance
• An autonomous, vibrant, open to fully remote, and flexible work environment
• Travel twice a year to a team event

Diversity & Inclusion

We know the tech industry has a diversity problem. Without proactively addressing this, we could easily end up hiring a lot of very similar people. So we’re enthusiastically encouraging applications from underrepresented groups in our industry. We hire with fairness and awareness—and we mean it.

Whoever you may be: regardless of age, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender, religion, disability, background, or identity, we’d love to hear from you. If you need any adjustments during the interview process, let us know and we’ll accommodate.

Who we are

Oliva is a tight-knit, experienced, and passionate team of engineers, designers, marketers, and psychologists. We’ve all been through our own battles with burnout, anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression. And while we’ve all had both positive and less positive experiences with mental healthcare, we know first-hand that talking through your problems makes a massive difference once you find the right person.

Our co-founders, Javier Suarez and Sançar Sahin, have both experienced the emotional highs and lows of scaling successful tech startups and lived to tell the tale. Javier co-founded the business travel startup TravelPerk—which went on to serve thousands of businesses and employ hundreds of people—and previously led innovation at Booking.com. Sançar has led marketing teams at Typeform, Hotjar, and GetApp.

If you’ve ever felt like you needed mental health support but had no idea where to start, you’re in good company. Our goal is to stop people feeling like that.

You can be based remotely for this role within 3 hours +/- from CET time zone but you will be required to travel 2-4 times a year for up to 3 nights. Please only apply if you have legal authorization to work in your preferred location.