Our client is a technology, innovation, and consumer intelligence firm that advises global leaders on emerging science, technology, and market trends to drive smarter, more confident innovation decisions. They combine proprietary research, primary data from startups and industry experts, and advanced analytical frameworks to help organizations identify high-value opportunities, mitigate risk, and accelerate growth. By integrating human expertise with AI-enabled tools, they deliver objective, evidence-based insights that translate complex technological and consumer signals into actionable strategies for R&D, corporate innovation, and executive decision-making. They serve many of the world's largest technology and consumer goods companies.

Position Overview

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone who runs teams and ships. You will own the day-to-day delivery and health of a core engineering team of four, spanning established products and a next-generation AI-native platform, as a player-coach: leading and growing the people, owning the cadence and quality of what gets built, and staying close enough to the code to make and challenge technical decisions yourself.

You will report to the CTO and operate as their operational right hand, translating strategy into execution so the team delivers predictably and the technical bar keeps rising. You will partner closely with the platform architect, senior engineers, product, and research, owning how the team executes and helping shape technical direction alongside them.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and grow the core engineering team; own hiring, coaching, performance, and career growth
• Own day-to-day delivery: planning, prioritization, execution, iteration cadence, and unblocking
• Install and maintain a lightweight, effective delivery process (clear ownership, visible backlogs, written specifications and acceptance criteria) and actually run it
• Reduce key-person risk across the team by spreading knowledge and ownership
• Raise the engineering bar: code review, testing, CI/CD, observability, and operational hygiene across both legacy and greenfield systems
• Drive pragmatic modernization of established systems while keeping them stable and secure
• Stay hands-on: review designs and code, prototype, and contribute to core components where it adds leverage
• Make and challenge technical decisions on the merits; earn the trust of senior engineers through technical credibility
• Keep the AI-native platform work delivering, in partnership with the platform architect who owns its deep design
• Partner with product and research to turn business needs into a clear, sequenced plan of work
• Act as the CTO's deputy for day-to-day operations

Qualifications

• Demonstrated success running and scaling engineering teams, with real people-management experience (hiring, coaching, performance)
• Proven track record owning delivery for a team: predictable execution, sound process, and the judgment to keep it lightweight
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with significant hands-on depth; able to read and review code and stay technically current
• Strong command of system design, distributed systems, scalability patterns, and architecture trade-offs
• Breadth across a mixed technology estate (for example Python, Ruby on Rails, .NET), and pragmatism about meeting systems where they are
• Solid foundation in API and service design, data modeling and pipelines, cloud-native infrastructure (AWS preferred), CI/CD, testing, observability, and production operations
• Working fluency with AI-native development: LLM-powered systems, retrieval (RAG), agentic workflows, and the practices around them (evaluation, observability, guardrails)
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field (Master's a plus), or equivalent practical experience

What Success Looks Like

• A servant leader who leads by example and gives credit to others
• Someone who creates clarity in ambiguity rather than waiting to be handed it
• Bold and practical, turning ideas into outcomes
• Wants to build something exciting and larger than themselves