Head of Engineering in London

Our Mission - Join us in shaping the future of paid search intelligence. Adthena is an award-winning search intelligence platform powered by patented AI technology and a team of dedicated experts. We help brands, marketers, and agencies dominate their competitive landscapes with unparalleled insights into the paid search market. Our Whole Market View, Smart Monitor, and Local View solutions give clients the clarity to optimize spend, increase ROI, and stay ahead of the competition.

Trusted by global brands like Citibank, L’Oréal, and Volvo, and backed by Updata Partners, we’ve been redefining search intelligence since 2012. In 2025, Adthena continued its winning streak, earning 8 major search industry awards. Highlights include Best AI Search Software Solution at the US Search Awards, Best Search Software Tool at the European Search Awards, and Best Software Innovation at the Global Search Awards.

Why Join Us: We offer the best of both worlds: the maturity and stability of a well-established company combined with the energy, agility, and impact of a scaling tech organisation. If you’ve been hesitant about joining a typical tech company due to concerns about chaos, fragility, or volatility, Adthena is your answer. We’re smaller than large-scale enterprises, offering more autonomy, less red tape, and accelerated growth.

• Startup Engineering culture
• Strong Culture: Our quarterly surveys show a 93% average approval rating for company culture, with an overall eNPS of 27.
• Award-Winning Product: US 2025 Search Awards for Best AI Search Software Innovation
• Stock Options: Our employees do incredible work, so as we grow, everyone shares the rewards.
• Trust-Based Vacation: Take as much time off as you need, when you need it.
• Remote-First: 52% of Adthenian’s work fully remote, with others choosing Hybrid Work at our 3 Geohubs (London, Austin, Sydney).
• Flexible Work: Work how and where you do your best, with full autonomy over your day.
• Career Growth: Bespoke training and career development via "Sherpa plans” to guide your growth.
• Monthly Hackdays & Training Days
• Family Care Package: Up to 6 months fully paid maternity leave, and 2 months paternity leave.
• Home Office Stipend: $200 for your ideal remote setup.
• Swag Welcome Gift: $70 credit to grab some merch.
• Regular Socials: Summer & Christmas parties, annual and quarterly offsites, monthly meet-ups.
• Volunteer Days: Make a difference with paid volunteer time each quarter.

About the Role: Reporting to: Paul Felby, Chief Product & Tech Officer Location: UK Remote Start Date: ASAP

What you’ll do at Adthena: This role offers the opportunity to lead engineering at a company operating at the intersection of large-scale data, machine learning, and the rapid evolution of search. Adthena works with some of the world’s largest brands to provide competitive intelligence across traditional search platforms and the emerging generation of LLM-driven search experiences, including Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

As Head of Engineering, you will be responsible for the technical execution behind a platform that processes vast volumes of search data, runs complex distributed computations, and delivers enterprise-grade insights used daily by global marketing teams. The challenge is not greenfield experimentation, but building, scaling, and evolving systems that already matter and extending them into entirely new areas.

You will step into an organisation where AI is already part of how software gets built. We were early adopters and are now a leading company in this space. Engineering teams use AI day-to-day to write, review, and evolve code. This role carries ownership of taking those practices further, setting standards, shaping ways of working, and helping define what effective AI-assisted development looks like at scale.

A significant part of the opportunity lies in shaping how Adthena expands competitive intelligence beyond Google into LLM-driven search platforms. This involves leading the development of new systems that help enterprises understand visibility, competition, and opportunity in search experiences that are rapidly becoming mainstream.

GenAI is embedded throughout the product and platform, from analysing complex datasets, to backend verification and labelling workflows, to generating insights and dashboards for clients. As Head of Engineering, you will play a key role in guiding how these capabilities are designed, operationalised, and scaled to deliver consistent, reliable value.

As Adthena continues to grow, this role is central to strengthening the engineering organisation, accelerating delivery, and ensuring the technical foundations support sustained innovation, high quality, and long-term scale.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Architecture: Own the engineering roadmap execution for all products and platform capabilities. Join architectural discussion regarding direction for distributed data processing, ML pipelines, and web application architecture. Ensure scalable, reliable systems that can handle massive datasets and evolving ML workloads.
• Delivery & Execution: Establish predictable delivery processes across all teams, improving speed without sacrificing stability. Implement measurable engineering KPIs such as cycle time, deployment frequency, MTTR, and platform SLAs. Drive continuous improvement in release quality through QA automation and DevOps collaboration.
• Leadership & People Management: Lead and mentor direct reports; create a culture of ownership, accountability, and high performance. Build an engineering organisation that scales, hiring, role definitions, and career paths. Foster a healthy, collaborative environment that supports deep technical work and cross-team alignment.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product to prioritise work, refine requirements, and ensure successful product delivery. Work closely with Data Science/ML teams to bring research into production-grade systems. Collaborate with DevOps/SRE on infrastructure strategy, cost optimisation, and operational reliability.
• Strategic Contribution: Contribute to the company-wide technology strategy alongside the CTO. Identify opportunities to accelerate innovation through tooling, platform investments, or architectural change. Manage engineering budgets, tooling spend, cloud infrastructure cost, and vendor relationships.

Who we look for

Research shows men apply if they meet ~60% of the criteria, while women and underrepresented groups apply only if they meet all requirements. If you have the skills but don’t meet every requirement, reach out – we’d love to explore how you could be a great fit!

Required Experience

• Technical Experience: Proven leadership of multi-team engineering organisations (20+ engineers). Strong background in distributed systems, high-scale data pipelines, and ML model deployment. Deep understanding of modern data stacks, e.g., Spark, data bricks, and cloud-native architectures. Previous experience working with Data Science teams and understanding how machine learning models are delivered. Strong grasp of TypeScript/React or at least modern front-end engineering environments. Solid experience with DevOps practices: CI/CD pipelines, containerisation, orchestration, monitoring, and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• Leadership & Management: Experience running engineering organisations with multiple disciplines (backend, web, data, ML, QA, DevOps). Demonstrated ability to build high-performing teams and coach strong engineering managers. Excellent judgment around trade-offs between delivery speed, tech debt, stability, and innovation. Comfortable in a fast-paced SaaS environment with enterprise customers and high expectations for product reliability.
• Soft Skills: Outstanding communication: clear, concise, and effective with technical and non-technical stakeholders. Highly organised with strong planning and prioritisation ability. Bias for action with a pragmatic, problem-solving mindset. Values transparency, collaboration, and developer happiness.

Nice To Have

• Experience with search engines, advertising technology, or competitive intelligence products.
• Familiarity with ML lifecycle tooling (feature stores, model deployment platforms, pipeline orchestration).
• Experience with agentic coding.

Our Core Values

All Adthenians are expected to align closely with our ‘Core Values’.

• Get Shit Done: We’re big on taking action, owning our challenges, and finding solutions.
• Freedom with Responsibility: We take charge of results to recognition. We know that our hustle not only moves the needle for the company but also sets us up for personal success.
• Deliver Remarkable Quality: We care about exceeding expectations in the work we do and aim to always do our best work as individuals and as a team.
• Smart & Always Improving: We strive daily to expand our knowledge and become better at what we do.

Meet your teammates: You’ll work closely with: Paul Felby