Head of Engineering

This job is posted for Earth Finance via Parallel Earth Finance is hiring a Head of (software) Engineering to contribute to the evolution of SpatiaFi, 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. Lead the team 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. Set strategy and standards 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 delivery 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 the architecture 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, BigQuery).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. Run the platform Own operations of the SpatiaFi 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. Stay hands-on 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. Use AI to ship better code, faster Lead how the team uses AI coding agents).Set the rules for AI-generated code: what gets reviewed, what gets tested, and how we catch errors before production.Measure whether AI tooling is actually improving speed and quality, and adjust. What you'll bring 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years leading engineering teams.Strong hands-on Go and React (TypeScript); you still enjoy writing code.Working knowledge of Python, particularly for data pipelines.Google Cloud architecture expertise, other clouds (Azure, AWS) is a benefit.Platform engineering experience: CI/CD, Terraform, observability, developer tooling.Experience running production systems, including on-call and incident response.Experience leading engineers in a startup or small, fast-moving team, ideally remote.Experience running Agile delivery and shipping to production frequently.Hands-on experience with a security or compliance framework such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.Practical experience with secure development and building security into CI/CD.Real experience using AI coding tools in a team, and opinions on how to use them well.Plain, direct communication with both engineers and non-technical leaders. Nice to have gRPC and protocol buffers.Geospatial, climate, energy or environmental data experience.Experience managing engineers who work directly with customers. Compensation and Benefits Final salary will be commensurate on your experience.Medical, Dental & Vision.Paid vacation and 12 company holidays.A 401(k) plan with match.A super fun, passionate, dedicated team committed to creating a sustainable and financially sound future for organizations, people and the planet. ** Please note, Earth Finance will not provide Visa sponsorship for this position.