Engineering Director (Data & Platform)

Job Title:

Engineering Director (Data & Platform) Reporting into:

CTO / Co-Founder Salary:

up to ~£200k / €230k (potential flex for strong candidates) Equity : up to ~0.5%, currently valued at ~€500k (aiming to ~x10 in 3-4 years) Location:

fully remote anywhere in Europe (quarterly team get togethers) Company:

Cyber Security SaaS start-up building

AI agents

to identify and resolve cloud vulnerabilities Funding : $30m+ (Series A) Employees : ~35 (20 in Engineering) structured in high-ownership, rapid-output teams (2-3 engineers each + Squad Lead)

Product context This rapidly-scaling AI-native cybersecurity start-up is building autonomous AI agents that investigate cloud vulnerabilities, determine exploitability and guide remediation (+working on autonomous remediation as we speak).

Under the hood, that means: High-throughput event ingestion Cloud-native data infrastructure Distributed orchestration systems Evaluation and observability pipelines Performance-sensitive backend services

The role We’re hiring a senior technical leader to own the platform side of a engineering - think infrastructure, data systems, core backend foundations. This is not a coordination role. It is not a process role. It is not a board-reporting leadership job.

This is for someone who: Has led 10-20 engineers in a rapidly-scaling start-up Managed 3-6 squad leads Has built large scale distributed systems Understands data platforms deeply Still commits code and wants to stay close to tech

What you’ll be doing: Leading high performing data platform/BE teams - you'd start with 3 Squad Leads under you, building that out to ~6 over time Stay close to architecture, code and design decisions Review code and contribute when needed Ensure their data and infrastructure foundations scale with agent workloads Drive performance, reliability and developer velocity Hire exceptional backend/data/platform engineers Develop the next generation of tech leads

You will be measured by:

customer impact, system performance, revenue enablement as well as team quality and satisfaction.

✅ Must have requirements: Low ego, high empathy & emotional intelligence Experience leading remote teams Technical credibility - you're not expected to be the strongest programmer in the room, but will be leading world-class talent who needs to respect you (they will interview you) Strong software engineering background and ideally a mastery of

Python

(Rust/Go/Elixir are also fine) Strong

data platform

knowledge (streaming, batch, storage layers, infra design) Deep understanding of

distributed systems

and scalability trade-offs, with experience scaling systems under real load Deep

AWS

expertise Proven ability to operate in ambiguity and build from first principles

Bonus points for: Previous experience in big tech/companies moving massive data volumes as well as rapidly scaling start-ups Familiarity with

AI / Machine Learning

infrastructure Understanding of / experience with

LLMs

or

AI-agent systems Domain expertise in AI and/or Cyber Security, ideally understanding of vulnerability management Experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, custom orchestration layers) Evaluation frameworks, tracing, observability for LLM systems