Head of Engineering

About the Role

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to lead our engineering team through its next stage of growth. Reporting to CEO, you’ll own how we build: our technical direction, architecture, quality standards, delivery process, and, most importantly, the team itself.

This is a leadership role rather than a hands-on coding one. Your impact will come through the decisions you steer, the standards you set, and the engineers you hire and grow. You’ll still need deep technical credibility to challenge designs, weigh trade-offs, and earn the trust of engineers and customers alike.

As a startup, we move fast and make pragmatic decisions. You’ll balance speed with quality in a domain where data accuracy, auditability, and trust are non-negotiable. You’ll also act as the voice of technology across the business and with our customers, and help shape how CarbonChain uses AI, both in engineering and across the company.

What You’ll Do

Own technical strategy and decision-making: set the direction for our platform, make and document key technical decisions, and keep engineering aligned with company goals as they evolve.

Steer architectural decisions across our system, from ingestion pipelines and provenance tracking to CBAM data sharing workflows, so that what we build is scalable, reliable, and audit-ready.

Build, coach, and nurture the team through hiring, onboarding, regular 1:1s, career development, and performance management, creating an environment where engineers do their best work and want to stay.

Own quality across engineering by defining our QA strategy, testing approach, and code review practices. You won’t review every PR, but you’ll make sure reviews are consistent, effective, and uphold our standards.

Build and maintain an engineering process playbook covering how we plan, scope, ship, handle incidents, and learn from retrospectives, and mature it as the team grows without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.

Make sure priorities are well maintained and balanced by working with Product, Sales, Customer Success, and the Carbon Team to agree trade-offs between new features, technical debt, reliability, and customer commitments.

Lead AI adoption in the engineering team, through AI-assisted development, tooling, and workflows, and across the wider business, identifying high-value opportunities and setting sensible guardrails given the sensitivity of customer data.

Act as the face of technology at CarbonChain: join client calls where needed, explain our architecture and data handling to enterprise customers, and support security and procurement conversations.

Partner with the leadership team on headcount planning, engineering budget, tooling, and infrastructure costs.

Champion a culture of ownership, pragmatism, and customer focus, staying comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities while keeping the long-term picture in mind.

What We’re Looking For

Extensive experience in software engineering, including significant exposure leading engineering teams, ideally at a scaling startup or SaaS company.

A strong technical foundation in modern web applications and distributed systems, with enough fluency in Python, TypeScript, cloud architecture, IaC/Terraform, and CI/CD to steer decisions confidently without writing production code yourself.

A proven track record of hiring, coaching, and retaining engineers, and of building healthy, high-performing team cultures.

Experience introducing and maturing engineering processes such as delivery planning, QA, code review, and incident management in a growing team.

Sound, pragmatic judgement on trade-offs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

Strong collaboration skills: you work closely with the Founders, Product and Commercial teams to shape priorities, advise on feasibility, and make decisions together.

Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex technical topics to non-technical colleagues and being credible and confident in front of enterprise customers.

Hands-on experience driving AI adoption in engineering teams, and curiosity about how AI can improve the wider business.

Bonus: experience with data-intensive systems, particularly where data quality, lineage, or auditability matter.

Bonus: understanding of security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.

Bonus: experience in climate tech or sustainability.

How We Work

As a hybrid co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the UK and US. This role would be located 3d/week in our London LABS Camden office space. You will need the right to work in the UK.

What we offer

Meaningful impact and accelerated growth.

This is a rare opportunity to work on technology that directly addresses the climate crisis while shaping the future of a fast-growing company. You'll take the lead on engineering strategy, roadmap and team evolution.

You'll tackle diverse challenges, work across the full stack of problems (technical and otherwise), and own meaningful projects from start to finish. If you want to learn quickly, take on real responsibility, and see the direct results of your work, this is the place to do it.

Competitive salary and benefits:

28 days annual leave

£500 home office setup allowance

£1,000 annual learning allowance

Private healthcare

Company pension incl. salary sacrifice options

Generous parental leave policy

Weekly team lunches in the office

Office gym, and cycle to work scheme

Remote work contribution of £1,000 towards expenses for working abroad.