Head of Engineering in London

Financial advisers spend a disproportionate amount of their working day on administration — writing up meeting notes, updating CRM records, generating compliance documentation — rather than talking to clients. PlannerPal fixes that. Our AI platform automatically captures, structures, and routes everything that comes out of a client meeting. Generic productivity tools don’t work here: financial advice is a specific, heavily regulated domain with workflows unlike anything else. That’s why hundreds of advisory firms — including two top-10 UK wealth managers — use PlannerPal rather than attempting to adapt off-the-shelf tools.

We’re VC-backed, integrate with a growing list of industry-standard CRMs for advisers, including Iress Xplan, and were named by FT Adviser as one of the top 3 AI tools for financial advisers.

The Role

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to own the technical delivery and architectural direction of PlannerPal. You’ll manage two squads (eight engineers total), report to the CPTO, and work directly with customers and partners on integrations.

What You’ll Own

• Overall system architecture: Python (backend), React + Flutter (frontend), Postgres, AWS (S3, ECS)
• End-to-end solution design for new features and partner integrations
• Technical strategy for our LLM-based AI pipelines
• Pragmatic trade-off decisions across scope, performance, scalability, and security

Delivery

• Technical roadmap execution across two squads
• Engineering practices: code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, observability
• Maintaining a high but sustainable delivery cadence

Team

Direct management of two squads, each led by a Lead Engineer. Coaching and developing engineers at all levels. Recruiting as the team grows. Setting and upholding engineering standards company-wide.

Partners and Customers

Lead technical architecture discussions with enterprise customers and strategic partners. Own the design of integrations with a growing list of industry-standard CRMs for advisers, including Iress Xplan.

The Team

You’ll manage two squads of four engineers, each led by a Lead Engineer — eight engineers in total today. Each squad spans senior to junior levels, giving you real scope to develop people as well as hire. We’re at the stage where the team is large enough to need real structure, but small enough that how you shape it will be lasting. We expect to grow to a third squad within the next 12–18 months as new enterprise contracts come online — manageable, planned growth. You’ll report directly to the CPTO.

What We’re Looking For

Must Have

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time at lead or principal level
• Comfortable working across both statically and dynamically typed languages; strong experience with modern web technologies including HTML5, CSS, and React
• Proven experience designing and shipping LLM-based AI pipelines in production
• Direct people management experience — not just tech lead, but genuine line management
• Solid AWS experience (ECS, S3, RDS or equivalent)
• Strong instincts around CI/CD, automated testing, and production reliability
• Experience leading delivery across multiple concurrent workstreams
• Right to work in the UK

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, wealthtech, or another regulated industry
• Familiarity with CRM or financial platform integrations
• Experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, tracing)

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary, depending on experience
• Employee share options
• Remote-first (UK-based team) with regular in-person meet-ups
• Work directly with the founding team; your decisions will have real impact
• A growing team where you’ll have room to expand your scope as the company scales
• This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll be close to the architecture, reviewing design decisions, and representing engineering in commercial conversations — not managing from a distance.