Head Of Product Engineering

November 7, 2026

Remote

Head

München, Germany

Indeed

Description

A European security-compliance startup is hiring a hands-on Head of Product Engineering to own engineering end-to-end — technical direction, delivery pace, quality and hiring — working directly with the CTO. The role starts with shipping features alongside the team, then scales the organization through an AI-heavy, low-meeting engineering culture. Fully remote within EMEA with CET/CEST overlap.

Responsibilities

Ship a meaningful feature with AI alongside the team in the first month
Find where features take three weeks and fix tooling, review and testing
Start regular 1:1s focused on weekly output, quality and AI usage
Own engineering hiring and build a process that runs without CTO oversight
Decide how the team is organised as it grows and which lead roles to hire first
Run the engineering organisation and technical direction beyond the first quarter
Own how engineers test, review each other's code and security, and how work is organised
Refine software development processes and own cycle time from spec to production
Improve how engineers test and automate while keeping the zero-bug policy holding
Manage team structure, performance reviews, hiring plan, managers and tech leads
Keep pushing the AI-assisted engineering playbook in craft and in management
Build something with the team now and then to keep the playbook honest

Requirements

10+ years as a software engineer, including 6+ years leading engineering teams and 2+ years managing managers or tech leads
Grown an engineering team to 15+ at a VC-funded startup and hired most of it yourself
Built hiring process, levels, performance reviews and salary bands from scratch, kept lightweight
Shipped AI features to production — retrieval, RAG, agentic workflows
Product taste: a keen sense for what makes a product feel great
Built and shipped with Claude Code and Cursor in real production work
Senior or principal engineer before managing, able to hold own in a design review or debugging session
Built something zero to one at a startup or scaled a team through the messy middle
Able to work in European timezone (CET/CEST), EMEA-based, ideally Germany or UK
Nice to have: grown an engineering org past 20 in the AI era
Nice to have: taken an engineering team through an ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audit
Nice to have: led engineering for a B2B SaaS product moving from SMB into mid-market

Conditions

Less than 2 hours of meetings per week, we write before we meet
Small temporary teams that form around the problem, ship and dissolve
100% remote with a real virtual office in Gather
Generous equity package — we're all owners here
€1,000 per year development budget — yours to spend on whatever makes you better
Remote workspace support plus co-working access
26 days of holidays plus local public holidays
Comprehensive health insurance coverage
Annual retreat — past destinations include Alicante and the Austrian Alps
Latest tech: MacBook, monitors and headphones
Competitive salary benchmarked to European market rates, specifics shared once we talk
Full-time employment