Head of Engineering

Contract type: Permanent

Location: Remote - based in the UK or Ireland

Reports to: CEO

Kyckr is a fast-scaling SaaS and data company transforming how Financial Crime teams verify businesses. We provide regulated institutions - banks, law firms, payment providers, and more - with the tools to onboard customers, assess risk and maintain ongoing compliance with confidence. Founded as an ambitious attempt to build the world's first truly global business register, we now partner with over 100 of the biggest names in Banking, Fintech and Regtech to power their business verification processes. Our platform provides a single access point to live data from 300+ corporate registries worldwide, normalised and enriched at the point of request. This real-time, source-verified approach is unique in our industry and technically demanding - but it's what makes Kyckr the trusted provider in our space. Recognised as a Category Leader for KYC Data Solutions by Chartis Research in 2024, we've just delivered a record year of growth and are still only getting started.

This is a rare opportunity for an outstanding engineering leader to join an ambitious, early-stage business (with substantial family office backing) in a senior management role. As the technical counterpart to a commercially driven CEO, you will:

• Define and execute our technical strategy.
• Recruit and develop a world-class engineering team.
• Shape the product roadmap and guide critical build, buy, and partner decisions.

You'll be working alongside alumni of some of the most innovative data companies in the world, gaining exposure to strategic decision-making while helping scale a company with both big ambitions (both organic and M&A) and genuine social purpose.

The right candidate will combine vision-setting leadership with hands-on curiosity. If your last GitHub contribution was years ago - or you'd rather talk about AI at conferences than experiment with agents in your own time - this isn't the role for you. We're looking for someone just as comfortable fixing a bug as advising on architectural design, someone who thrives in the "multiple hats" environment of early-stage tech and remains unfazed by shifting priorities.

Above all, you're a mature, intrinsically motivated technology leader who loves data. Our daily work spans building API integrations, maintaining robotic data-extraction processes, writing OCR engines, and refactoring data pipelines. At the same time, we're beginning to invest in AI (agentic frameworks, LLMs for data extraction) and data storage innovation.

Our stack is hosted on Microsoft Azure (App Services, Azure Functions, and .NET applications on VMs) with Azure SQL databases for data storage and retrieval. We manage delivery through Azure DevOps, including CI/CD pipelines and work item tracking. There are currently 9 people in the team (split across the UK, Ireland, Philippines and Australia) with scope and budget to expand the team in line with our wider strategic goals.

• Technical Strategy & Delivery: Own solution design and planning for Kyckr applications, services, and supporting Azure infrastructure.
• Engineering Standards: Set and maintain system architecture standards, ensuring scalability, resilience, and maintainability across the platform.
• Roadmap Alignment: Partner with the Head of Product to align the roadmap with current delivery and future priorities.
• Performance & Reliability: Lead performance engineering, ensuring scalability, resilience, and capacity to support projected workloads.
• Production Excellence: Oversee investigation and root cause analysis of production issues, driving a culture of reliability and continuous improvement.
• Alignment: Collaborate with the Principal Cloud Engineer to ensure infrastructure and software engineering efforts are fully aligned.
• KPI Tracking: Define, track, and report on engineering KPIs (e.g., velocity, uptime, deployment frequency, defect rates) to measure delivery effectiveness and system health.

• Engineering Leadership & Execution: Maintain visibility across all engineering workstreams, providing guidance, unblockers, and technical oversight where required.
• Mentoring: Pair with developers to support problem-solving, mentor on best practices, and raise overall technical quality.
• Agile Leadership: Facilitate agile ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, refinement, reviews, retrospectives) and manage team boards and workflows.
• Capacity Planning: Lead engineering team capacity planning, balancing roadmap delivery, technical debt, and operational maintenance.
• Documentation: Collaborate on technical documentation to support internal alignment and external needs (e.g. RFPs, due diligence).

• People & Culture: Provide career leadership: conduct regular 1:1s, support professional development, and align individual goals with Kyckr's mission.
• Talent Acquisition: Recruit top engineering talent: screening, running technical and culture-fit interviews, and ensuring smooth onboarding with HR.
• Culture: Foster a high-performance, collaborative culture that embraces accountability, learning, and experimentation.

• Governance, Security & Compliance: Take ownership of security leadership within engineering: embedding secure-by-design practices, ensuring data protection, and conducting regular threat modelling and reviews.
• Standards Compliance: Ensure engineering practices and systems comply with ISO27001, SOC2, and other relevant standards.
• Budget & Reporting: Participate in budget planning and reviews relating to engineering requirements.
• Stakeholder Reporting: Report regularly to senior management on team milestones, challenges, KPIs, and achievements.

• System architecture & solution design: proven ability to design scalable, secure, and resilient systems, and to lead or review architecture discussions.
• .NET / C# expertise: extensive experience with .NET Core and .NET Framework, with deep proficiency in C#, applying best practices in design, implementation, testing, and performance optimisation.
• API development: experience building and supporting RESTful and SOAP APIs, including authentication, versioning, and documentation.
• Data layer proficiency: solid experience with SQL Server (queries, stored procedures, optimisation) and general database design.
• Cloud deployment: hands-on experience deploying and running .NET applications and services in Microsoft Azure (VMs, App Services, Azure Functions).
• CI/CD & DevOps: experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, Git-based version control, and automated build/test/deploy processes.
• Production reliability: proven track record of root cause analysis, incident management, and production support in live environments.
• Work item management: practical experience with systems such as Azure DevOps or Jira for backlog management, sprint planning, and tracking technical debt.
• Security practices: familiarity with secure-by-design principles, identity management, and embedding security into the SDLC.
• Testing & quality: strong background in automated testing (unit, integration, regression) and building for reliability.

• Scale-up journey: 2-3 years of experience in a senior role with a SaaS company @ $5-20m ARR, ideally as part of a scaling journey.
• Data specialist: Proven track record of building, launching, and maintaining products with data at their core.
• Compliance expertise: Responsibility for achieving ISO27001 and/or SOC 2 Type II certification.

• Buy-side M&A integration: Adept at incorporating newly acquired platforms or services, ensuring smooth transitions and value creation.
• Regtech experience: Experience in a regtech or company data provider.
• Corporate registry familiarity: Experience working with, or integrating, corporate registry data.
• PE/Family Office background: Able to interface effectively with investors, and meet stretching goals.
• AI/automation in data: Experience applying AI/ML, OCR, or robotic processes for data extraction, enrichment, or workflow automation.
• Customer-facing exposure: Ability to engage with enterprise customers or partners in technical pre-sales or solution-engineering discussions.