Head of Engineering

Who We Are Building the AI-first frontier enterprise. We are a global technology consultancy with a trademarked, AI-first approach-Gen-e2™. It redefines how enterprises build digital products and transform their organizations with AI. We do the right thing, and we do it right. We’re proud to be a World Economic Forum New Champion, and a B Corp-certified company. We are small enough to care locally, big enough to deliver globally (10 countries, 450+ experts from 50+ nationalities) We are becoming an agentic organization, adopting the AI-native operating model we bring to our clients We are robust and resilient (100% independent, 0 debt, founded 2009) We are AI-native professionals who invest in what we believe and work as a collective intelligence We are positive, courageous and deliver at the leading edge Your Role As Head of Engineering at PALO IT Labs, reporting directly to the CTO, you are the operational engine of our engineering organisation. You translate strategy into daily execution, lead our AI engineering community, and ensure every team-client-facing or product-side-delivers at the highest standard. Where the CTO sets direction and makes structural architectural decisions, you make those decisions real. You own the day-to-day: team health, engineering standards, roadmap execution, and the development of our AI engineers. You are the technical authority your teams rely on to unblock, challenge and grow-while the CTO focuses on vision, key clients, and long-term positioning. Engineering Excellence Deploy the Gen-e²™ technology roadmap defined by the CTO: architecture governance, AI governance, and factory standards (agents, prompts, rules, pipelines) across all squads Own the token economics of our delivery, balancing model cost, latency and quality across squads, so “AI-first” means production-grade, not prototype-grade Operate one level above Lead Engineers: arbitrate divergences, challenge local decisions, spot systemic debt and keep the bar rising as execution becomes increasingly agentic Deploy on our most complex client engagements as the senior technical authority: design AI-first architectures and see them through to production-you ship, not slide decks Step in as Tech Lead on client projects when needed: if a mission requires it, you can take the technical lead role directly, ensuring continuity and quality without waiting for a resource to be available Define and enforce engineering standards: CI/CD practices, code reviews, incident management, and security posture across squads Own technical incidents and escalations with clear ownership and post-mortems People & Community Directly manage Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) and later AI tech leads and - their growth, performance, workload and career paths are yours Own the engineering community’s rituals end to end: critiques, showcases, community days, learning circles and the shared knowledge base that keeps them visible, inclusive and connected to real delivery challenges Foster cross-project collaboration by connecting engineers facing similar challenges, surfacing reusable patterns, and turning field learnings into shared standards Set the community’s norms and health signals: champion psychological safety, experimentation, wellbeing and sustainable pace, and run lightweight pulse checks to catch issues early Build the mentorship engine: create structures and learning pathways for Senior Engineers and Forward Deployed Engineers, and grow the technical leadership bench Operate the hiring process for engineering roles: sourcing strategy, interviews, technical assessments and recommendations to the CTO Partner with delivery and staffing teams to maintain visibility of capacity and utilisation, support staffing decisions, and turn bench time into meaningful learning, R&D or community contribution Gen-e2 Practice & R&D Feed everything back into Gen-e²: what you learn on live engagements becomes standards, artefacts, prompts and learning pat