Head of Engineering

You have a strong software engineering background and have successfully transitioned into engineering leadership.

You have experience leading through team leads or engineering managers, and enjoy developing other leaders.

You understand how to introduce enough structure to help team scale, without introducing unnecessary process.

You remain technically proficient and enjoy working directly with engineers on architecture, debugging, design reviews, or pairing.

You understand modern software engineering practices, including TDD, pair programming, and continuous deployment.

You are passionate about climate impact and excited about Gigaton’s mission to decarbonise heavy industry.

You enjoy working with domain experts to solve complex real-world problems.

You have an educational background in the physical sciences.

You have experience building software for scientific, industrial, or data intensive systems.

You have worked closely with machine learning or data engineering teams.

💡 You are not expected to check every box, and we’d love to hear from you even if your experience isn’t an exact match.

We’re building a team that reflects the world we want to change. Our people come from all walks of life - different countries, cultures and experiences - and we think that’s one of our biggest strengths. We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels safe, respected and celebrated. No matter your background, if you’re excited by what we do, we want to hear from you.

Our interview process is designed to understand how you think, lead, and work with others. We are not looking for a perfect match against every requirement. We are looking for evidence that you can build a high-performing engineering organisation in a complex, high-stakes domain.

Pair programming

You’ll work with one of our engineers on a small technical exercise. We are not assessing memorised syntax or speed under pressure. We are interested in how you reason, how you collaborate, how you use tests to guide your work, how you learn from documentation or tools, and how you communicate while solving an unfamiliar problem.

System design

You’ll walk us through a real system you have worked on and had meaningful architectural influence over. We’ll ask you to describe the problem, the constraints, the operational characteristics, the design choices you made, and how the system evolved over time.

Management scenarios

You’ll work through a set of realistic management scenarios: production incidents, conflicting priorities, delivery pressure, and career development.

There are no single correct answers. We are looking for how you diagnose situations, how you create alignment, and how you help teams learn. This stage is intended to understand your management style, your operating principles, and your ability to lead through complexity.

Operating Principles

We’ll discuss examples from your past work that relate to how we operate: ownership, ambition, honesty, adaptability, and kindness. We’re proud of our operating principles and they are published on the internet.

Finally, we believe hiring is a two-way process. Just as we’ll reference-check candidates before making a final offer, we encourage you to reference-check us by chatting to team members you haven’t yet met. Ask anything. We’ll answer with Concrete Honesty.

Once interviews are done, we’ll move quickly to a decision, and we’re always happy to give feedback at any stage.

📈 Equity in the company: When we win, you win. You’ll get share options, so you’re part of our journey from the inside.

🕰️ Flexible working We trust you to know how and when you work best and to work that out with your team.

🌴 30 days of holiday (plus bank holidays). Rest is productive. Take the time you need to recharge

🪙 A generous pension scheme. We’re planning for the future in more ways than one. Our Operating Principles

↗️ Go Gig or Go Home : High Bar, All In. What we do matters to humanity, to our customers and to each other. We hold ourselves to an extraordinarily high bar and bring the urgency this mission requires.

🏭 Concrete Honesty : Be honest. As concrete forms the foundation of our world, genuine honesty and transparency are the bedrock of our culture.

🦾 Autonomous Ownership : High agency, high ownership. We build systems that take control and make things better. We do the same: see it, own it, drive it.

😄 Cement it with Kindness & Fun : Have fun, be kind. We're here to extend Earth's life, but ours is still limited. We want to enjoy the ride. To see these in full, go to Gigaton’s Operating Principles Notion page.