Head of Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: Porto

Employment Type: FullTime

Position Overview

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering & AI to join our team and play a pivotal role in scaling our engineering and machine learning organization, while staying hands-on with development where it matters most.

You’ll be responsible for role modeling the right behaviors, shaping our engineering culture, growing a high-performing team, driving execution, and fostering innovation - all while building and maintaining world-class infrastructure to power real-time business data.

You’ll lead a team of ambitious senior engineers (software and ML/AI) with deep fintech experience, many of whom have built and scaled products at leading unicorns. This role blends technical leadership and people leadership: you’ll set direction, optimize for growth, and contribute directly to development when needed.

As an early-stage startup, we pride ourselves on rolling up our sleeves and building from scratch - you should be ready to get your hands dirty with code and systems design. We all love to build, scale, and grow: our leadership team has a strong track record of building products, scaling teams, and driving growth, and our ambitious engineers join us from leading tech companies and unicorns.

We move fast, embrace uncertainty, and wear multiple hats to build the best products we can. We bend over backwards for our customers. If you care about solving complex technical challenges, scaling teams, and thriving in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment, we’d love to hear from you.

What you'll do

• Define the technical strategy and long-term architecture of our core platform in close collaboration with the Founders.

• Drive execution with a relentless focus on delivering customer value, optimising for efficiency, impact, and speed.

• Take a pragmatic approach to software development, balancing scalability, security, maintainability, and high performance across critical systems

• Continuously track key KPIs to assess team effectiveness, product reliability, and technical outcomes

• Manage, mentor, and guide a team of experienced engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, improvement, and technical excellence

• Build a high-performing engineering organisation, recognising and developing talent through example, feedback, and hands-on leadership

• Ensure the right tools, processes, and systems are in place for rapid detection, debugging, and resolution of real-time production issues, including thorough root-cause analysis.

• Work closely with cross-functional teams to define technical requirements, project scope, and priorities that align with product goals and business objectives

• Proactively balance technical debt with new feature development, ensuring short-term velocity doesn’t compromise long-term quality

• Report on engineering progress and insights to support founder updates and strategic decision-making

• Champion innovative, disruptive thinking, while ensuring technical decisions align with and strengthen the company’s long-term vision

What you bring

• Proven track record in 0→1 environments and in scaling products, teams, and systems

• Experience with data processing and data platforms (highly desirable)

• Proven success leading and growing high-performing engineering and/or ML teams

• Background as a strong individual contributor (backend engineer or ML engineer), not just a people manager

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Python

• Ownership of full end-to-end technology stacks in software (backend services, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, and alerting) and ML (deploying and operating models in production, not just prototypes)

• Expertise with Google Cloud Platform (or an equivalent provider such as AWS or Azure).

• Experience with relational database modelling, ideally using PostgreSQL or MySQL

• Deep understanding of engineering best practices, including DevOps and CI/CD methodologies

• Experience working directly with founders (not just product managers) is highly desirable

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, able to balance data-driven decision-making with sound judgement in ambiguous or low-data environments

• Excellent communication skills, able to adapt your style and optimise for execution and 0→1 speed while respecting the required quality bar

• Customer-obsessed, caring more about solving real customer problems than purely elegant technical solutions

• Delivery-oriented, focused on outcomes and impact rather than process for its own sake

• Energized by being in the office with the team, happy to jump on a whiteboard with engineers in person to solve hard problems

Our Offer

• Tackle meaningful problems with real-world impact

• Competitive salary and equity package

• Join us onsite in our offices in Porto

• Flat hierarchy with direct access to the founders

• Top-of-the-line equipment

• Private health insurance, plus sick and compassionate leave as needed

About us

Condukt is the next-generation compliance platform for financial services, offering an agentic solution powered by real-time data for business identity.

Always-on and policy-aware, Condukt enables financial institutions and fintechs to gain actionable insights into business verification - unlocking growth, increasing efficiency, and strengthening compliance.

We were founded by former operators and builders with deep experience in banking, payments, and lending. Today, our team spans across London and Porto, bringing together engineers, product owners, and operators from companies like Revolut, Meta, Block (Square), SumUp, American Express, Yandex, and Marshmallow.

Trusted by leading regulated entities, including Wise, Tide, Mollie, Shift4, Flatpay, and myPOS, Condukt is backed by top investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and MMC Ventures.

If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected].