Head of Engineering in Slough

We’re seeking an exceptional Head of Engineering / Engineering Manager to partner closely with our CTO and lead the next stage of our engineering organisation. We want a deeply technical leader who still loves to build, leads from the front, and thrives in high-velocity, high-ownership environments. Your mission: build the fastest engineering team on the planet.

Who you are:

• You’re a top-tier engineer with proven leadership experience in fast-moving startups or scaleups.
• You’re comfortable making imperfect decisions quickly, you’ve built products under pressure, and you know that momentum beats perfection.

You might be:

• A seasoned engineer who has already stepped into a Head of Engineering / Engineering Manager role at a venture-backed startup.
• An ex-founder who has built and shipped products under real pressure.
• A startup tech lead who thrives on ownership and bold decisions.
• A pragmatic builder who values time-to-value over “the right way”.

What makes you perfect for this role:

• Engineering leadership: You’ve coached and unblocked engineers in high-velocity, high-pressure environments.
• Deep technical expertise: You have strong architecture instincts and solid security knowledge, but you’ll cut through complexity to keep shipping.
• Startup operator mindset: You’ve taken products from 0→1 or through hyper-growth and know how to build systems that evolve with the company.
• Velocity obsession: You believe iteration > perfection, and your instinct is always to get value in front of users as fast as possible.
• AI-first: You’re bullish on AI, vibe-coding daily, and always looking for ways to push velocity through AI-assisted workflows.
• DevX focus: You obsess over developer experience because you know great tooling = more speed.
• Execution focus: Monitoring, observability, and performance aren’t “nice to haves”, they’re how you ship fast without breaking trust.

What you’ll do:

• Set the bar for engineering velocity: coaching, mentoring, and unblocking the team every day.
• Make architectural and security calls fast, balancing speed with long-term resilience.
• Build and own best-in-class developer experience - tooling and workflows that eliminate drag.
• Monitor and protect reliability and SLAs, while still moving at startup speed.
• Establish a culture where iteration is celebrated and perfectionism is challenged.

How we work at Lightdash:

• We build in public. Open source means moving fast with shared context.
• We challenge problems, not people. No blame, just solutions.
• We’re highly collaborative. Independent, but we win as a team (and with our community).
• We bias hard toward impact. We’d rather ship the wrong thing quickly and learn, than waste weeks polishing what nobody needs.

Our tech stack:

• Primary: TypeScript, React, Node, SQL
• Frameworks: Express, React-hooks, Redux, RTK, Mantine
• Infrastructure: Docker, GCP, Kubernetes, Tracing, Prometheus

While familiarity with our stack is helpful, we value your ability to learn and adapt over specific technical experience.

⚡ We’re deliberately looking for ambitious leaders from startups and high-growth companies. If you want predictability, long roadmaps, and “the right way” over speed, this isn’t the role for you.

👉 Research shows that women and underrepresented groups often don’t apply unless they meet 100% of the requirements. Even if you don’t tick every box, if you have startup experience and a hunger for velocity, we’d love to hear from you.