Head of Engineering

Earth Finance is hiring a Head of (software) Engineering to contribute to the evolution of Spatia Fi, our award winning geospatial platform.

You’ll lead Earth Finance’s engineering team inside the Technology Division. This is a startup Head of Engineering role: you set the direction and the standards, and you also write production code. You’ll be the person who makes a small, distributed team ship fast without cutting corners on quality, security or compliance.

There's no big org to inherit here. You’ll shape how we build, from architecture and engineering standards to delivery rhythm and how we use AI coding agents safely. You’ll also own the day-to-day running of the product platform.

As a member of the Technology leadership team, you will work closely with the Head of Product to jointly deliver on our Technology vision and help staff our Forward Deployment Opportunities.

• Manage, coach and grow the whole engineering team: core product engineers and Forward Deployed Engineers.
• For Forward Deployed Engineers, you own the people side (growth, performance, hiring). Customer engagements are run separately.
• Run regular 1:1s, set clear goals, give direct feedback, and handle performance issues early.
• Own hiring and onboarding, and decide when to build in-house versus use contract partners.
• Build a culture of ownership: engineers own what they ship, from design through production.

• Turn product and business priorities into a practical engineering roadmap.
• Own and evolve our engineering standards: coding, code review, documentation, testing and AI-generated code.
• Make build-versus-buy and technical-debt calls with cost in mind. We add environments, tools and processes only when they earn their keep.
• Track a small set of delivery and quality measures (e.g. lead time, change failure rate, incident count, error budget) and act on them.

• Run Agile delivery across several product streams: planning, prioritization, standups, reviews and retrospectives.
• Keep the process light. Use the parts of Scrum or Kanban that help a small team, and drop the rest.
• Give the business honest, early estimates and status, including bad news.
• Work closely with product, science and data teams, and with Forward Deployed Engineers on customer engagements.

• Own day-to-day architecture and technical standards. The VP of Technology keeps overall accountability for architecture for now, and you’ll work closely together on it.
• Know our application architecture end to end:
  Go services with gRPC, React frontends, Python data pipelines, and Google Cloud (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Big Query).
• Help design sound Google Cloud architecture: networking, IAM, environments, cost and scaling.
• Lead platform engineering: CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Terraform), observability, and the internal tools that make engineers productive.
• Make security part of design, not a gate at the end: threat modelling, secure defaults, least-privilege access.

• Own operations of the Spatia Fi product platform: reliability, monitoring, alerting and capacity.
• Take part in the on-call rota and lead incident response when things break.
• Own engineering's part of incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Set and track reliability targets, and make sure backups and recovery actually work.

• Spend about 30% of your time hands-on, writing, reviewing and shipping production code in Go, React and / or Python.
• Pick up hard problems, prototypes and critical fixes yourself when the team needs it.
• Lead by example on code quality, testing and documentation.

• Lead how the team uses AI coding agents).
• Set the rules for AI-generated code: what gets reviewed, what gets tested,…