Head of Engineering

Project Overview

Our client is a climate technology startup focused on enabling green financing and advancing the voluntary carbon market. Backed by a leading global bank and collaborating with global energy and climate players, they are building innovative digital and AI-powered solutions that streamline how carbon credit projects are developed, financed, and evaluated.

You will join an ambitious team building a carbon intelligence platform that leverages AI, LLMs, and automation to improve project assessment, due diligence, risk scoring, and data workflows—ultimately scaling climate action across geographies.

The Head of Engineering / Head of Technology will define, build, and scale the end-to-end technology vision. This includes leading the engineering organisation, architecting the platform, and driving the development of AI-powered tools and infrastructure.

This is a hands-on leadership role that requires deep technical expertise, a strong architecture mindset, and comfort operating in a fast-paced, early-stage environment.

Key Responsibilities

Technology Leadership

• Define and own the overall technology strategy aligned with product and business goals.
• Provide technical direction for AI/ML, product architecture, cloud infrastructure, and systems design.
• Foster a culture of rapid iteration, engineering excellence, and innovation.
• Make strategic decisions on build vs. buy, platform architecture, and systems scaling.

AI, LLMs & Automation

• Lead development of LLM-powered tools for project evaluation, documentation analysis, due diligence automation, and risk scoring.
• Integrate proprietary and open-source LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, Mistral, etc.) into core user workflows.
• Build scalable AI infrastructure to support inference, retrieval, prompt engineering, embeddings, and RAG pipelines.
• Oversee vector database integrations (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate) and intelligent search systems.

Product & Platform Engineering

• Architect secure, scalable backend systems supporting carbon project onboarding and market workflows.
• Develop and oversee APIs, microservices, asynchronous architectures, and data pipelines.
• Integrate with external systems such as carbon registries, MRV tools, satellite data, emissions datasets, and third-party APIs.
• Ensure seamless UX across stakeholders including developers, project owners, financiers, and auditors.

Team Management & Engineering Delivery

• Recruit, manage, and mentor engineering, DevOps, and AI/ML teams.
• Oversee agile delivery including sprints, backlog management, release planning, and feature governance.
• Ensure reliability and uptime of production systems, prioritizing performance, scalability, and security.
• Define engineering KPIs and ensure timely release cycles.

Security, Infrastructure & Compliance

• Lead cloud architecture decisions (AWS, Firebase, or similar).
• Implement best practices for security, IAM, secure coding, OWASP, and DevSecOps.
• Ensure alignment to certification standards (ISO/SOC2) relevant to financial-grade and climate data systems.
• Oversee CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code, automated testing, scanning, and deployment.

Requirements

Experience

• 10+ years in technology leadership roles, ideally in startups or fast-scaling tech companies.
• Proven success leading engineering teams building complex platforms from 0 to 1
• Hands-on coding proficiency and deep architectural capability—this is not only a people-management role.

Technical Expertise

• Expert-level experience in JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js, NestJS, distributed systems, async event processing, messaging queues, and microservices architecture.
• Strong backend capabilities (Node.js, Python, Postgres, SQL & NoSQL).
• Deep experience with cloud-native environments (AWS/Firebase), DevOps, IaC, CI/CD, monitoring, and production-grade infrastructure.
• Familiarity with authentication/authorization frameworks, service discovery, DNS, API integrations, and systems performance tuning.
• Front-end experience in React and modern UI frameworks.
• Experience operating highly available production systems, ideally in financial or regulated environments.

AI/ML Skills

• Hands-on experience building or integrating LLM-powered features.
• Strong knowledge of prompt engineering, embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval systems (RAG).
• Experience deploying AI systems in production environments.

Bonus / Nice-to-Have

• Experience with blockchain-based registries or smart contracts.
• Exposure to carbon markets, sustainability data, or MRV systems.
• Familiarity with carbon credit standards (Verra, Gold Standard, Puro).
• Experience with geospatial datasets or climate/ESG modeling.

Soft Skills

• Strong leadership, communication, and strategic thinking.
• Highly collaborative, comfortable working cross-functionally with product, data, and commercial teams.
• Entrepreneurial mindset—able to balance speed, quality, and technical debt.