Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering

Office Location: Holborn, London - hybrid working environment (3 days in office per week).

Our Mission

Historically, investing in options has been complex and limited to wealthy and professional investors, but our mission is to level the playing field and finally make options trading accessible.

After raising £3.5mn, we launched our first mobile app that strips back the complexity, removes the commissions, and enables options to be traded as easily as shares.

The Role

We are looking for a Head of Engineering to drive and take ownership of our engineering strategy, manage our growing engineering team, and ensure our systems remain reliable as we scale toward 100,000+ users. And working alongside our CTO to help define the technical vision.

You will be responsible for building a best-in-class product, partnering with our CTO to define the technical strategy and long-term architecture of the Investa platform. You’ll also ensure that as the team grows, our systems remain fast, our releases are frequent and stable, and our engineers are mentored to be high-performing.

You are senior enough to architect complex solutions on a whiteboard, yet technical enough to dive into the backend to unblock the team or resolve production issues when necessary. This is your chance to step into a key leadership role at a pivotal phase of Investa’s growth journey.

What You’ll Do

• Team Management & Onboarding: You will be responsible for the day-to-day management of the squad. As we continue to grow our engineering team, you will lead the onboarding process, career development, and performance reviews to ensure new hires integrate and perform quickly.
• Operational Excellence: You are responsible for system reliability. You’ll implement on-call structures, performance monitoring, and incident response processes to ensure platform stability.
• Strategic Partnership: Work directly with the leadership team to turn the product roadmap into a realistic engineering execution plan.
• Technical Unblocking: Maintain a deep understanding of our stack (TypeScript, Serverless, GCP/AWS) to resolve technical bottlenecks and guide architectural decisions.
• Standards & Quality: Maintain high standards for code quality and testing. You ensure best practices are followed across every pull request and release.

About You

• Engineering Leader: You have experience managing engineers, handling difficult performance conversations, and coaching team members through their career progression.
• Technical Background: You have a strong background (6 years+) in Backend architecture with enough exposure to Frontend and Mobile to understand a full-stack trading application.
• End-to-End Ownership: You have a track record of delivering complex projects from initial concept through to deployment and long-term maintenance.
• Startup Mindset: You understand the pace of an early-stage company and have that pragmatic, ‘builder’ mindset.
• Reliability Mindset: You are focused on system uptime, security, and building scalable infrastructure.
• Regulatory Awareness: A genuine interest in working within an FCA-regulated business and is aware of the security standards required for a UK fintech app.

Your Background

• 6+ years software engineering experience in a high performing team and/or company, with a proven track record of owning robust, scalable systems and delivering mission-critical impact.
• 1.5+ years proven experience leading engineering teams in a fast-paced environment. (FinTech experience is a plus).
• Strong technical foundation in Backend languages and a deep understanding of systems design environments.
• Experience implementing engineering metrics such as Uptime, Latency, and Deployment Velocity.

On-call

• All engineers at Investa are involved in providing support for our products. This involves responding to events outside of working hours and is a core part of the role of all engineers.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary: £130,000 - £150,000 depending on experience, with an annual salary review.
• Equity: One off grant of £20,000 in tax-efficient equity options, with additional grants linked to performance and milestones.
• Bupa private healthcare and dental insurance.
• 30 days of annual leave (including bank holidays) + your birthday off.

Interview Process

• Stage 1: Introductory chat with Talent Lead (20 mins)
• Stage 2: Technical & Architectural deep dive (20 mins)
• Stage 3: Coding Stage (90 mins)
• Stage 4: Systems design interview (90 mins)
• Stage 5: Final Behavioural interview (60 mins)
• Offer