Head of Engineering

Who are Picnic & what do we do? Picnic’s mission is to drive a higher quality ad-funded internet. Today, a large proportion of digital advertising is ineffective, intrusive and poorly optimised. Picnic builds technology that helps brands make better decisions about where and how their advertising is shown, improving outcomes for users, advertisers, and publishers alike. We’re a fast growing, founder-led startup. Over the last couple of years, we’ve built a strong platform foundation and developed clear conviction around our product direction. We’re now entering a new stage where execution, reliability and scale matter as much as innovation.

To support this next phase, we’re looking for our first Head of Engineering.

What will you be doing as Head of Engineering? As Head of Engineering, you’ll report to the Chief Product & Technology Officer and take end-to-end ownership of engineering execution, playing a central role in how Picnic scales technically and organisationally. You will:

• Own delivery of the engineering roadmap, taking complex decisioning and optimisation capabilities from prototype through to reliable, scalable production systems.
• Provide technical leadership across platform infrastructure, data pipelines, applied modelling, real-time services, and external APIs.
• Act as architectural steward of the platform, ensuring consistency, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency as complexity increases.
• Build and evolve engineering practices around system design, DevOps, observability, automation, and operating production systems at scale.
• Lead, coach, and develop the engineering team, establishing clear standards, progression paths, and a strong engineering culture.
• Lead the platform’s evolution to serve external customers and partners, with clear guarantees around reliability, data freshness, versioning, and service expectations.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll be close to the systems and technical decisions, while also setting direction and enabling the team to move faster and more safely.

Who are we looking for? We’re looking for an experienced, pragmatic engineering leader who has operated at a senior level in a startup or scale-up environment and is excited by the opportunity to take broad ownership of engineering execution and scale a team and platform end to end. You will:

• Have led or managed engineers in a start-up or scale-up environment.
• Have strong hands-on experience with cloud architecture, within AWS.
• Have experience working across product engineering, data systems, and platform infrastructure.
• Have built and operated production systems with high requirements around reliability, performance, and cost control.
• Be able to balance short-term delivery pressure with long-term architectural health.
• Be comfortable operating in an experiment-driven, discovery-focused environment, and know how to transition from exploration to production.
• Be an effective people leader, or actively looking to grow into a broader leadership role.
• Be familiar with machine learning concepts and the infrastructure required to deploy and operate models in production.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Be excited by the opportunity to shape Picnic’s engineering function and platform from the ground up.

Experience in advertising technology is a bonus, but not required.

Why work at Picnic? You’ll be joining Picnic at a pivotal moment, where strong engineering leadership can materially shape the trajectory and value of the business. At Picnic:

• You’ll have real ownership and influence over the engineering function and technical direction.
• You’ll work closely with the founder and leadership team to translate strategy into execution.
• Ideas move quickly from concept to production — we value momentum, learning, and impact.
• You’ll help build a platform used by external teams and systems to make high-value decisions at scale.

What can Picnic offer you? We’re proud to have been recognised by Culture100 and Flexa as one of the best and most flexible small businesses to work for. We offer:

• A flexible, hybrid working setup (with regular time together in our London Bridge office).
• 33 days holiday (inclusive of Bank Holidays), plus additional Christmas shutdown.
• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality.
• Picnic pension contribution.
• Inclusive parental leave policy.
• A great co-working space, regular socials and offsites, Picnic Thursdays, Summer Fridays and ‘Work from Roam’ opportunities.