Head of Engineering

About Match Bingo

We’ve taken the social, ritualistic warmth of bingo and built a football‑themed version that runs entirely off real‑world match data. People love it. We’re licensed, regulated, and have just closed a funding round that gets us to the next inflection point.

Today the product is football. Tomorrow it’s broader sports. Eventually it’s any media event with a structure that fits bingo’s rhythm. The game has years of runway in the roadmap before we run out of categories to expand into.

We’re small (10-ish people right now), distributed (English‑speaking Ukrainian engineering team, currently spread across Ukraine and neighbouring countries), and headquartered in the UK. We’ve raised funding for the next stage and we’re hiring across the senior team to do it. You’d be the first hire of this build‑out.

• You build the team underneath you. The engineering team that exists today is yours to lead. The team that will exist 18 months from now is yours to hire. If this works, you scale a team of 30+ under you and ride a real product into a real market position.
• You get equity. Real equity, in a real EMI scheme, in a company that’s already shipping and already monetising. You’re not buying into a pitch deck.
• You drive the AI transition. Our team has been slow to embrace AI‑augmented engineering. Changing that is on your list. If you’ve already wired AI tools into how you ship product, this is your moment to do that at company scale.
• You're in a regulated industry. Soft gambling is high‑stakes for compliance, payment flows, KYC, age‑gating, fair‑play. If you’ve worked in regulated spaces before — gambling, fintech, healthcare, etc. — you already know why this matters. If you haven’t, you’ll learn fast.
• Hybrid working, your choice of office. Three days a week in London,
  Tunbridge Wells or Bath
  . Two days from home.

In your first 90 days:

• Sit alongside the Chairman and CEO and understand the product roadmap, the commercial logic, the regulatory constraints and the engineering reality underneath them.
• Meet every member of the engineering team and form a view on who needs what.
• Audit the current development process — how work is specified, estimated, shipped, tested, released — and start fixing what’s broken.
• Pick the AI tooling you want the team on (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, whatever) and lead the migration.
• Write the first technical/product spec under your own name — fully owned, no committee.
• Build an understanding of compliance — understand which product decisions require compliance input and establish a process that keeps the product moving without cutting regulatory corners.

In the year after that:

• Lead the team through a major roadmap arc — football season cycles, regulatory milestones, expansion into adjacent sports.
• Bring quality up across the four codebases — your call on tooling, test discipline, release cadence.
• Hire alongside the wider build‑out: more engineers, and product or delivery talent under you if needed.
• Be the bridge between an ambitious Chairman/CEO and a delivery team — translating, prioritising, defending the team’s time.
• Run the relationships with platform vendors, regulator bodies, and third‑party API providers.
• Understand the commercial performance of the product — working with the data and ops teams to monitor game profitability, payout ratios, and player economics, and using those insights to shape engineering and product decisions.
• Lead the technical design and development of new game formats — new sports, new event types, new mechanics — building a content pipeline that extends the product well beyond football.
• Work closely with the data team to make player behaviour — retention curves, session patterns, drop‑off points, conversion rates — a primary input to engineering priorities, product decisions and roadmap trade‑offs.

• High agency. You see something broken, you fix it. You don’t wait for permission and you don’t run six approvals before acting. The Chairman and CEO will give you the strategic direction; getting from there to working software is your call to make, not theirs.
• Independent. This isn’t…