Head of Engineering

You are driven by Transition Zero's mission: building software to accelerate clean energy adoption is a matter of genuine personal urgency, not just a job. You are deeply committed to advancing the energy transition and passionate about creating high-quality software platforms.

We seek individuals who exhibit ownership, accountability, and loyalty. Our culture thrives on feedback, so you must be a high‑agency individual with strong self‑awareness and dedicated to Transition Zero's mission.

In addition to a proactive, problem‑solving mindset and keen attention to detail, as a growing organisation, we require collegiality and empathy for your coworkers.

While we are a rapidly growing tech startup, we are also a non‑profit, so a high level of adaptability and willingness to approach challenges with creativity and curiosity is essential.

You are:

• A hands‑on engineering leader who directly manages software engineers – coaching, developing, and holding them accountable.
• A technical thinker who looks beyond the current stack to evaluate what the platform needs to truly scale, not just what is familiar.
• A delivery‑focused operator who ships value incrementally and urgently, complementing visionary leadership with rigorous execution.
• A believer in engineering excellence – robust APIs, open standards, operability, and reliability as first‑class concerns. You don’t accept mediocre work from yourself or others.
• Someone who understands the real‑world performance and scaling challenges of running a computational platform used by external customers, and is laser‑focused on user success as the driver of Transition Zero’s success.
• A confident decision‑maker who can make strong calls despite incomplete or evolving information, and pivot quickly when the mission demands it.

We are looking for an experienced engineering leader to own the delivery, technical quality, and team performance of our backend platform. This platform powers Scenario Builder, our no‑code electricity grid modelling interface, and is being developed as a Platform‑as‑a‑Service (PaaS) model, enabling external users to use our infrastructure directly for energy modelling workloads.

You will directly manage the software engineering team, acting as both their line manager and delivery lead. This is not a manager‑of‑managers role: you will be close to the work, involved in architectural decisions, and accountable for the team’s output. You will also serve as the delivery manager for the backend platform, owning the planning, prioritisation, and execution of the engineering roadmap in partnership with Product and the CTO.

A critical part of this role is ensuring the platform is architected for the future. Our backend must evolve from serving a single product into a scalable, multi‑tenant platform capable of handling computationally intensive energy modelling workloads from external users. You will need to think critically about technology choices, challenge assumptions about the current stack, and bring experience of what it takes to build and operate platforms at scale.

• Own the end‑to‑end delivery of our backend platform, ensuring commitments are well defined, prioritised, and executed on time – with a bias to action and a focus on delivering value incrementally and urgently.
• Act as the delivery manager for the platform roadmap, translating product requirements and technical strategy into actionable, sequenced engineering work.
• Ensure the team ships early and often at a high standard – prioritising actions that have the highest impact on the mission and hunting out problems before they become blockers.
• Provide clear, concise summaries of delivery status, risks, and dependencies for senior leadership.
• Partner with the Head of Product to shape roadmaps and balance feature delivery, technical debt, quality, and operational stability.
• Ensure teams use Agile practices effectively (sprint planning, stand‑ups, retrospectives, estimation) and continuously improve how they work.
• Drive the transition towards a PaaS delivery model, coordinating the engineering work required to support external platform users…