Ottimate - Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering

Key Responsibilities :

Technology Leadership :

- Define the technology roadmap aligned with business goals and product strategy.

- Drive architecture decisions, tech stack evolution, scalability, and system design.

- Evaluate emerging technologies and make informed build vs. buy decisions.

Team & People Management :

- Lead, mentor, and scale a team of software engineers, QA, DevOps, and architects.

- Foster a culture of innovation, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.

- Set clear goals, KPIs, and review mechanisms for individuals and teams.

Execution & Delivery :

- Own end-to-end delivery of tech projects from planning to production.

- Establish agile practices, sprint planning, and robust release management.

- Ensure uptime, performance, scalability, and security of all systems.

Collaboration & Strategy :

- Partner with Product Managers and Founders to translate product vision into technical execution.

- Collaborate with design and QA to ensure user-first, testable, and scalable features.

- Present tech updates, risks, and solutions to stakeholders and leadership.

Required Experience & Skills :

- 12-15 years of hands-on experience in software development, with 45 years in a tech leadership or director-level role.

- Proven experience building and scaling cloud-native applications (preferably on AWS / Azure / GCP).

- Strong foundation in system architecture, microservices, REST APIs, databases (SQL & NoSQL), and distributed systems.

- Prior experience working with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and automated testing.

- Ability to scale engineering teams from 10 to 50+ and set up the right structure (pods, chapters, guilds, etc.).

Strong grip on modern tech stacks :

- Backend : Node.js / Java / Python / .NET

- Frontend : React / Angular / Vue

- Mobile : Flutter / React Native / Native (iOS/Android)

- Excellent problem-solving, debugging, and performance optimization skills.

- Passion for coaching engineers and driving a high-performance culture.

Good to Have :

- Experience in a startup / scale-up environment, especially in 01 and 1N journeys.

- Exposure to data engineering, machine learning pipelines, or event-driven architectures.

- Background in consumer tech / SaaS / fintech / healthtech is a plus.

- Prior experience as a founding engineer / early tech leader is highly desirable.