Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering – Rust / Distributed Systems Infrastructure

Salary: Up To £180,000

Location: UK

I’m currently working with an early-stage infrastructure company building high-performance distributed systems, with Rust at the core of the stack, who are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead the design, build, and scale of a genuinely differentiated systems architecture.

This is a pivotal role reporting directly to the CTO, owning the core engineering stack and leading a small but highly capable team. The business is building a new approach to real-time data and system infrastructure, designed to remove traditional dependencies on external services through a more tightly integrated, systems-native architecture.

You’ll remain hands-on technically while driving engineering standards, roadmap execution, and team growth.

This is a rare opportunity to join at the right stage and shape both the technology and engineering culture of a high-performance infrastructure platform with significant upside.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering across distributed systems, backend infrastructure, storage systems, APIs, and real-time data pipelines.
• Lead development of high-performance Rust-based services and distributed compute components.
• Drive performance optimisation across low-latency systems, event-driven architectures, and high-throughput workloads.
• Partner with the CTO on technical strategy, hiring plans, and roadmap execution.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers while staying close to the codebase.
• Own system design standards, internal tooling, and technical documentation practices.
• Support production incidents where needed and continuously improve system reliability.

Requirements

• Strong background in systems programming using Rust, Go, C++, or similar.
• Deep distributed systems knowledge including concurrency, replication, fault tolerance, and system design trade-offs.
• Experience building backend infrastructure, real-time systems, or high-reliability production platforms.
• Strong understanding of storage systems, data processing, and performance optimisation under load.
• Previous leadership experience managing and growing engineering teams.

If you’re an experienced engineering leader or senior systems engineer looking to step into a role where you can shape a Rust-first infrastructure platform from the ground up, then apply or get in touch directly.