Head of Software Engineering

Head of Engineering | Path to CTO in 12 months | Seed Stage AI Team UK Remote | £100-120k + up to 0.75% equity The company UK transport authorities, councils, and consultancies run the country's roads on fragmented data from cameras, sensors, and roadside infrastructure. Nobody joins it up, so decisions that shape how millions move every day are made on incomplete information. This company fuses that data into the operational intelligence layer for UK transport. Bus networks planned on live passenger flow, roadworks scheduled to cut congestion, highways monitored in real time. Deployed with National Highways, Connect Plus, local councils, and consultancies including Systra, Jacobs, and Atkins. Bootstrapped to £1M ARR and profitability before closing a £2.7M seed round. Targeting £5M ARR and Series A in the next 12-18 months. The Head of Software Engineering role They’re hiring a Head of Software Engineering to lead their existing team into a sharper, faster function - holding architectural ownership from day one. The expectation is that the strongest version of this hire grows into the CTO role over the next 12–18 months as the function expands and the team scales beneath them. This is a hands-on leadership role: technical contribution and architectural ownership, lightweight team management, and close partnership with product. It is not a pure management role - most of your time is spent building, leading, and solving hard problems. Realistically, year one balances building with establishing the function and getting your arms around platform ownership before it tilts fully toward greenfield work. You'll earn the CTO title in 12-18 months by hitting two clear triggers: demonstrated ownership the CEO can trust, and delivery against Series A and ARR targets. Who this is for You've led engineering through a Seed to Series A/B scaling arc at a B2B SaaS product company. You've managed at least 5 engineers with real hiring and delivery ownership. You've built and owned systems where data volume, quality, and modelling are the product, not a side effect. Data platforms are your natural terrain. You've shipped customer-facing AI to production in the last 12 months and can talk about your evaluation approach, not just your tooling. You use AI coding tools daily and have driven adoption across a team, with opinions about what works. You can hold your own on an enterprise customer call when the technical questions get real. The stack: React, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI, Dagster, dbt, Snowflake, AWS. You're either comfortable here or the kind of leader who gets there fast. Compensation £100,000-£120,000 base plus 0.5-0.75% equity with clear vesting and a credible exit thesis. UK remote, couple of days max in either their London or Bristol offices for company wide meetings. Timing First-stage calls this week and next. Full process runs 3-4 weeks end-to-end. Apply here or email [email protected].