Head of Engineering

At Xapien we are re-imagining how humans extract knowledge from the internet.

Every business, charity, and institution in the world, in every sector, needs to know who they are doing business with. Xapien helps them answer that question – quickly and accurately. Using machine learning and deep natural language processing, we are re-imagining how machines learn and reason about knowledge.

We reward bright minds with hard problems. Using deep Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and large-scale cloud computing, we find, read and assimilate millions of data points, on-demand, 24/7, without any human input or intervention, to produce insights to inform any business relationship.

There’s never been a more exciting time to join Xapien. We are a growing team of 25 people, doubling to 50 this year, and we are excited to hire our first Head of Engineering.

About the role:

We are looking for an ambitious and hands-on Head of Engineering to lead our growing team of engineers. You will be responsible for the entirety of the engineering organisation: its people, processes, and outcomes. You will report to our co-founder and CTO, Shaun, and work alongside Xapien’s leadership team to build a category-defining product and company.

Manage and inspire teams

• Empower our engineers with purpose, context, and direction to enable them to deliver their best work
• Shape a culture of ownership, feedback & learning, psychological safety, and fun
• Partner with our CTO to drive recruitment and retention of a diverse team of world-class engineers

Advocate for predictability and momentum in delivery

• Empower the engineering team to achieve a high level of technical quality and productivity
• Ensure the realisation of our product roadmap through excellence in execution
• Enable capacity to address time-sensitive needs without compromising the product roadmap

Bring cross-functional technical leadership

• Develop the technical strategy with the CTO as part of the leadership team responsible for company and product strategy
• Be accountable for product quality and non-functional characteristics

Questions you will help us to answer…

• What does an exceptional engineering culture mean for Xapien?
• How can we develop and scale a reliable and efficient release cycle?
• How can we build new products and continue to scale our infrastructure without linearly growing our engineering team?
• How should we measure the effectiveness of the engineering organisation and communicate its impact?

About you:

Required Experience

• You have extensive C# and AWS solution design and delivery experience, to a level where you can lead architectural design discussions, define our coding practices and coach our engineers
• Prior experience of technical leadership in a scale-up company
• You’ve previously held responsibility for the entire end-to-end development life-cycle
• Experience delivering horizontally-scaled, enterprise-grade commercial products

Bonus Experience

• Experience managing remote teams and enabling effective collaboration and asynchronous work
• Production-grade Python
• Interest or experience in large scale NLP & AI deployments.

More about us:

Everyone at Xapien is working together to build something transformational. It’s hard, challenging and exciting work for which we all share in the rewards that come from success. We strive to pay great salaries for great people but most importantly, everyone in Xapien owns shares in the business we are building together.

For this role, we’re looking at a range between £120,000 to £140,000.

We are working to a hybrid model, you’ll be spending around of 2 days a week working and having fun with us in our dedicated WeWork office in Moorgate. Outside that, you’ll find us working from home or in the office - it's up to you!

We also provide, what we hope is a generous and rewarding working environment, including:

• You will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme
• Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition
• Life Insurance - let’s hope nobody ever needs this!
• Unlimited holidays - yes, it’s really uncapped
• Everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a £1k professional development fund per year
• Most importantly of all, we will work with you, to help you to realise your fullest potential.

On the day to day stuff:

• All the tools and software you need to be effective and make your working life easier
• Regular team lunches and drinks
• Flexible working hours meaning you can plan your workday around your own schedule
• Fun and inclusive monthly social events, from poker nights to axe throwing and mini-golf
• We want you to be your best self - we will be standing beside you on mental and physical wellbeing