Head of Engineering

Who We Are 

Building the AI-first frontier enterprise. 

We are a global technology consultancy with a trademarked, AI-first approach-Gen-e2™. It redefines how enterprises build digital products and transform their organizations with AI. We do the right thing, and we do it right. We’re proud to be a World Economic Forum New Champion, and a B Corp-certified company. 

• We are small enough to care locally, big enough to deliver globally (10 countries, 450+ experts from 50+ nationalities) 

• We are becoming an agentic organization, adopting the AI-native operating model we bring to our clients 

• We are robust and resilient (100% independent, 0 debt, founded 2009) 

• We are AI-native professionals who invest in what we believe and work as a collective intelligence 

• We are positive, courageous and deliver at the leading edge 
  
  
  Your Role 

As Head of Engineering at PALO IT Labs, reporting directly to the CTO, you are the operational engine of our engineering organisation. You translate strategy into daily execution, lead our AI engineering community, and ensure every team-client-facing or product-side-delivers at the highest standard. 

Where the CTO sets direction and makes structural architectural decisions, you make those decisions real. You own the day-to-day: team health, engineering standards, roadmap execution, and the development of our AI engineers. You are the technical authority your teams rely on to unblock, challenge and grow-while the CTO focuses on vision, key clients, and long-term positioning. 

Engineering Excellence 

• Deploy the Gen-e²™ technology roadmap defined by the CTO: architecture governance, AI governance, and factory standards (agents, prompts, rules, pipelines) across all squads 

• Own the token economics of our delivery, balancing model cost, latency and quality across squads, so “AI-first” means production-grade, not prototype-grade 

• Operate one level above Lead Engineers: arbitrate divergences, challenge local decisions, spot systemic debt and keep the bar rising as execution becomes increasingly agentic 

• Deploy on our most complex client engagements as the senior technical authority: design AI-first architectures and see them through to production-you ship, not slide decks 

• Step in as Tech Lead on client projects when needed: if a mission requires it, you can take the technical lead role directly, ensuring continuity and quality without waiting for a resource to be available 

• Define and enforce engineering standards: CI/CD practices, code reviews, incident management, and security posture across squads 

• Own technical incidents and escalations with clear ownership and post-mortems 

People & Community 

• Directly manage Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) and later AI tech leads and - their growth, performance, workload and career paths are yours 

• Own the engineering community’s rituals end to end: critiques, showcases, community days, learning circles and the shared knowledge base that keeps them visible, inclusive and connected to real delivery challenges 

• Foster cross-project collaboration by connecting engineers facing similar challenges, surfacing reusable patterns, and turning field learnings into shared standards 

• Set the community’s norms and health signals: champion psychological safety, experimentation, wellbeing and sustainable pace, and run lightweight pulse checks to catch issues early 

• Build the mentorship engine: create structures and learning pathways for Senior Engineers and Forward Deployed Engineers, and grow the technical leadership bench 

• Operate the hiring process for engineering roles: sourcing strategy, interviews, technical assessments and recommendations to the CTO 

• Partner with delivery and staffing teams to maintain visibility of capacity and utilisation, support staffing decisions, and turn bench time into meaningful learning, R&D or community contribution 

Gen-e2 Practice & R&D 

• Feed everything back into Gen-e²: what you learn on live engagements becomes standards, artefacts, prompts and learning paths for the whole firm, in collaboration with international teams 

• Produce and own engineering KPIs: velocity, quality, incident rate, technical debt, and team health; report regularly to the CTO 

• Represent the engineering practice in leadership forums and working groups, communicate regularly on team health and needs, escalate risks promptly, and uphold PALO IT values, confidentiality, information security and professional standards 

• Contribute to pre-sales through technical scoping, estimation, proposal input and executive-level advisory, ensuring commercial promises remain grounded in production-grade engineering reality 

Who You Are 

• You bring significant software engineering experience, including leadership of an engineering organisation or practice (VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, Head of Tech, or CTO of a scale-up) 

• You have delivered production-grade AI-first systems, LLM integration, RAG pipelines, agent orchestration-and you think in token economics (cost, latency, quality tradeoffs) as naturally as you think in code. You master AI coding assistants as a force multiplier: you still code, by choice 

• You have led delivery in complex, client-facing environments (consulting, embedded squads, platform modernisation) with real users, real constraints and real accountability 

• You are a proven people developer and manager, with a track record of scaling engineering practices-not just individuals-through mentorship, community-building and hands-on AI adoption 

• You think in systems and write things down: architecture decisions under uncertainty, ADRs, standards that make quality reproducible 

• You are fluent at every altitude, from engineering stand-ups to leadership forums, and you switch between them in the same afternoon 

• You lead with care and exigence: high expectations held with accountability in a psychologically safe environment 

• You know how to read team signals early: engagement, workload imbalance, burnout risk, retention risk and under-utilisation, and you act with care, clarity and accountability 

• You care about Tech for Good: sustainability, accessibility and responsible AI are embedded in how you build 

• You are comfortable partnering with HR on hiring strategy, interviews, portfolio reviews, offer decisions and talent-pipeline building through community engagement and events 

• Bilingual French/English, English is mandatory for client and international collaboration 

• Nice to have: cloud architecture certifications (AWS SA, GCP/Azure Professional), public speaking or publications on AI-first delivery