Head of Engineering

Own engineering and product delivery end-to-end at Match Bingo — a UK-licensed football-themed bingo game. Work with the Chairman and CEO to shape the product direction, then lead the team that turns it into shipped software. Run the engineering team that builds it. Drive the culture, the quality bar, and the AI-augmented way of working that will let this team punch far above its weight. Just-closed funding round; you join at the moment things start to scale.

We've taken the social, ritualistic warmth of bingo and built a football-themed version that runs entirely off real-world match data. People love it. We're licensed, regulated, and have just closed a funding round that gets us to the next inflection point. Today the product is football. Tomorrow it's broader sports. Eventually it's any media event with a structure that fits bingo's rhythm. The game has years of runway in the roadmap before we run out of categories to expand into. We're small (10-ish people right now), distributed (English-speaking Ukrainian engineering team, currently spread across Ukraine and neighbouring countries), and headquartered in the UK. We've raised funding for the next stage and we're hiring across the senior team to do it. You'd be the first hire of this build-out.

Why this role is interesting:

• You own engineering across four codebases — PHP backend, native iOS app, JavaScript Android app, JavaScript web app — while also shaping how product decisions become shipped software. There is no VP Engineering above you. You report to the CEO directly and you make the calls.
• You build the team underneath you. The engineering team that exists today is yours to lead. The team that will exist 18 months from now is yours to hire. If this works, you scale a team of 30+ under you and ride a real product into a real market position.
• You get equity. Real equity, in a real EMI scheme, in a company that's already shipping and already monetising. You're not buying into a pitch deck.
• You drive the AI transition. Our team has been slow to embrace AI-augmented engineering. Changing that is on your list. If you've already wired AI tools into how you ship product, this is your moment to do that at company scale.
• You're in a regulated industry. Soft gambling is high-stakes for compliance, payment flows, KYC, age-gating, fair-play. If you've worked in regulated spaces before — gambling, fintech, healthcare, etc. — you already know why this matters. If you haven't, you'll learn fast.
• Hybrid working, your choice of office. Three days a week in London, Tunbridge Wells or Bath. Two days from home.

What you'll actually do:

• In your first 90 days: Sit alongside the Chairman and CEO and understand the product roadmap, the commercial logic, the regulatory constraints and the engineering reality underneath them.
• Meet every member of the engineering team and form a view on who needs what.
• Audit the current development process — how work is specified, estimated, shipped, tested, released — and start fixing what's broken.
• Pick the AI tooling you want the team on (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, whatever) and lead the migration.
• Write the first technical/product spec under your own name — fully owned, no committee.
• Build an understanding of compliance — understand which product decisions require compliance input and establish a process that keeps the product moving without cutting regulatory corners.

In the year after that:

• Lead the team through a major roadmap arc — football season cycles, regulatory milestones, expansion into adjacent sports.
• Bring quality up across the four codebases — your call on tooling, test discipline, release cadence.
• Hire alongside the wider build-out: more engineers, and product or delivery talent under you if needed.
• Be the bridge between an ambitious Chairman/CEO and a delivery team — translating, prioritising, defending the team's time.
• Run the relationships with platform vendors, regulator bodies, and third-party API providers.
• Understand the commercial performance of the product — working with the data and ops teams to monitor game profitability, payout ratios, and player economics, and using those insights to shape engineering and product decisions.
• Lead the technical design and development of new game formats — new sports, new event types, new mechanics — building a content pipeline that extends the product well beyond football.
• Work closely with the data team to make player behaviour — retention curves, session patterns, drop-off points, conversion rates — a primary input to engineering priorities, product decisions and roadmap trade-offs.

The character we're looking for:

• We're hiring an operator, not an administrator. A few specific traits matter more than the rest:
• High agency. You see something broken, you fix it. You don't wait for permission and you don't run six approvals before acting. The Chairman and CEO will give you the strategic direction; getting from there to working software is your call to make, not theirs.
• Independent. This isn't a role with constant management. You'll have weekly syncs and an open door, but if you need someone telling you what to do today, this won't work for either of us.
• Quality-obsessed. Quality is the thing we'll judge you on most. Not output volume, not feature count — quality of what ships. You set the bar; you hold the team to it; you coach people up to meet it.
• A coach, not a critic. Our engineers are good people doing their best in tough conditions. They need leadership that brings them up, not a manager who tells them they're underperforming. You can be both demanding and warm at the same time.
• AI-fluent and AI-evangelistic. Not just curious — actively using AI to ship better software, and capable of bringing reluctant engineers along.
• Direct. Distributed team, regulated context, multi-platform stack. None of this works with passive-aggressive Slack or fuzzy "let me circle back" half-answers. Tell people what you think and what you need.
• A football fan, or close to it. This product is football. The Chairman is not a football person — so the football fluency on the senior team starts with you. If you don't enjoy watching a Tuesday-night Premier League fixture, this isn't your role.
• Resilient under pressure. Tight deadlines, regulator deadlines, market deadlines, season-cycle deadlines. The role doesn't have quiet weeks. If that sounds energising, read on.

Must-haves:

• Five or more years' total experience in software engineering, technical leadership, engineering management, or technical product leadership. Title flexibility — what we care about is the actual scope and ownership, not the title on your CV.
• You have personally managed an engineering team of at least five people. Direct line management, not just dotted-line influence. Tell us when, where, how many, and what you shipped.
• You came from an engineering background. You spent at least three years writing production code in an engineering role before moving into product or management. We will ask you specific technical questions and expect specific answers.
• You can demonstrate a shipping history. Tell us what you have actually built and shipped. Be specific: which products, what role you played, what technical or product decisions you made, and what the outcomes were. CVs that list vague ownership without specifics will not progress.
• You have shipped consumer-facing digital products at scale. Mobile or web. Tens of thousands of users or more.
• You have AI-augmented development tooling fluency. You actively use AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, or equivalent) in your own work and have shipped real code or product specs using them.
• You can commit to three days per week in an office in London, Tunbridge Wells or Bath (your choice). This is a hybrid role with a real in-person component. Fully remote is not on the table for this hire.
• You have the right to work in the UK without sponsorship.
• You have a genuine interest in football or sport more broadly. We’re not testing tactical knowledge — we want to know that the product will hold your attention for years. Tell us what that interest looks like for you.

Nice-to-haves:

• Prior experience in iGaming, online gambling, fantasy sports, or sports media.
• Prior experience in any UK-regulated industry (financial services, healthcare, insurance, telecoms).
• Familiarity with PHP, native iOS (Swift), JavaScript app development (React Native or similar), or running multi-platform engineering teams.
• Experience working with distributed / fully-remote engineering teams (especially Eastern European or commonwealth time zones).
• Understanding of UKGC (Gambling Commission) regulatory frameworks.
• Experience scaling an engineering team from sub-10 to 30+ engineers.
• Played in a startup that went from sub-Series-A to Series-B-or-beyond.
• Experience designing or running on-call / incident-management processes for consumer-facing products.
• Spoken or written portfolio of engineering or product thinking (talks, blog posts, conference appearances).
• Played football yourself, or coached a team.

Compensation:

We're paying competitively for the talent we want. Not coyly — here's the band:

• Base salary: £95,000 – £135,000 depending on experience.
• Equity: Options via our EMI scheme, four-year vesting with a one-year cliff.
• Performance bonus: up to 15% of base, milestone-gated against shipped product and team OKRs.

Plus the standard UK package: 25 days annual leave + bank holidays, pension auto-enrolment with 5% employer matching, private health insurance (optional), £1,500 annual learning budget, equipment allowance for home setup.