Head of Technology (Engineering, Platform & Living Systems)

About the client

Role overview

Platform architecture and technical direction

• Own end-to-end architecture for device integration, MQTT event bus, data lake, Perception backend server, and agentic layer.
• Make the core platform reusable across office and residential products, with hospitality identified as a possible later use.
• Define local-first versus cloud design, using deterministic local control for everyday actions and frontier models for heavier reasoning while respecting personal data and UAE regulations.
• Lead build-versus-buy decisions and integrate partners where appropriate.

Engineering leadership and delivery

• Build, hire, and lead teams across AI, app/platform, hardware, and reliability.
• Partner with product owners to establish clear product ownership and engineering leadership for delivery.
• Set standards for code review, CI/CD, environments, documentation, and predictable sprint cadence.
• Turn the CAIO's vision and product roadmaps into technical plans, timelines, and staffing.

Hardware, lab, and reliability

• Own physical technology including lighting, sensors, switches, smart mirrors, speakers, cameras, wearables integration, and future robotics.
• Set up and run the lab and Experience Centre with real devices and systems for software development.
• Drive hardware RFPs and vendor selection with procurement and secure the technical side of partnerships.
• Build digital-twin simulators so software can be developed and tested before physical spaces exist.
• Own uptime and quality with automated monitoring, telemetry, alerting, and self-healing.
• Establish hardware/software integration QA, including functional, regression, stress, and chaos testing.
• Ensure spaces continue working manually with physical switches, safe defaults, and emergency overrides during network, cloud, or AI outages.

Privacy, safety, and research

• Lead privacy-first technical design for biometric and occupant data, including privacy impact assessment, consent, and per-person household data separation.
• Define and maintain AI safety guardrails and kill-switch design.
• Oversee R&D in wellness and longevity technology, robotics, and sensing, turning promising experiments into production capabilities.
• Maintain a technology radar tracking developments from Apple Home, Alexa, Samsung, and other developers.

Technical and leadership requirements

• Distributed/event-driven systems, edge and cloud hybrid design, data platforms, and API and integration design.
• Practical experience shipping LLM-based or agentic systems, including RAG, tool use, local model deployment, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Home Assistant, MQTT, KNX, Zigbee, Matter/Thread, building management systems integration, and network design for dense multi-unit buildings.
• Mobile (Flutter or native), PWA/web, backend services, dashboards, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Observability, telemetry, incident management, QA automation, and SRE practices.
• Privacy by design, biometric and health data handling, and regional data regulation such as UAE PDPL or GDPR equivalent.
• Built and led multidisciplinary software and hardware engineering teams of 15 or more, with a strong hiring record; comfortable in a fast-moving, founder-led environment.

Preferred qualifications

• Preferred experience shipping products combining software and physical systems, such as smart home, IoT, consumer electronics, robotics, wearables, or building technology.
• Wellness or longevity technology exposure, including integrations with comparable companies, is a strong plus.
• Experience taking systems from prototype to multiple deployed sites or thousands of devices is preferred.
• Hands-on prototyping, pull-request review, and debugging misbehaving devices are preferred.

Role opportunity and compensation

• The role offers the opportunity to develop AI, IoT, and wellness technology for homes and workplaces, with real buildings and a pipeline of thousands of units.
• Salary is described as competitive and aligned with market standards and role seniority, with additional benefits under the company's band structure; no compensation cadence or amount is specified.