Head of Engineering

Warden AI · London · £120,000–£140,000 (stated in the posting)

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About Warden AI

AI is increasingly making decisions that shape people's lives, and there is still no reliable way to know which systems deserve trust. Warden is building that trust infrastructure: the independent testing, standards and certification that let organizations demonstrate their AI is fair and compliant.

We started where the stakes are most personal: who gets hired. Today we audit AI hiring and HR systems for bias, and help vendors and employers map those results to emerging regulation, working with more than 60 HR Tech vendors including leading platforms like Greenhouse and Ashby, alongside a growing number of staffing firms and enterprise employers. In just a few years we have become the de facto standard in the category.

We are ten people, doubling in revenue every six months, with net revenue retention of 130%+, and deliberately profitable-minded rather than growth-at-all-costs.

About the role

Our engineering team is a small group of senior engineers who build everything from the pipelines that run our audits to the dashboards and reports customers rely on. Those audits carry weight with regulators, courts and enterprise buyers, so the systems behind them must be reliable and secure, and their results defensible.

As Head of Engineering, you'll lead and manage the team day to day, own engineering end to end, from architecture and delivery to security, and represent engineering to customers and auditors. It's a player-coach role, split roughly evenly between building and leading. You'll write production code yourself, and you'll also shape designs, hold a high bar in code review, and coach engineers through hard problems rather than solving them for them.

Beyond running the team, you'll shape how it works, at a time when AI is changing how software gets built. We're looking for someone with the ambition to rethink what engineering looks like at Warden, so the team's capability keeps pace with both a fast-growing business and what AI makes possible.

What you'll do

Hands-on engineering

• Spend around half your time writing production code, from our audit pipelines to the platform and infrastructure behind them
• Prototype new tooling and AI workflows yourself before rolling them out to the team
• Take on work that unblocks the team, while keeping yourself off the critical path

Technical direction

• Lead architecture decisions with the team, and own how the platform evolves as a whole
• Keep our platform and infrastructure reliable, secure and scalable, and own incident response
• Hold a high bar for quality, so our audit results are reproducible and defensible

Planning and delivery

• Work with company leadership on a realistic roadmap, balancing new features against platform investment and technical debt
• Lead day-to-day delivery, coordinating closely with our data and audit operations teams
• Give company leadership clear visibility into progress, risks and trade-offs

Team leadership and hiring

• Manage and develop every engineer, and shape the team's culture
• Lead engineering hiring, from defining roles and setting the bar to running interviews
• Grow the team's impact by rethinking its processes and tooling as AI changes what's possible

Security and compliance

• Lead our ISMS and certification work, including our ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II audits
• Ensure our systems and engineering practices meet our regulatory and contractual obligations, from privacy and security to how we use AI
• Represent engineering in customers' security reviews and due diligence

What success looks like in your first 90 days

• You understand our platform and how our audits work well enough to lead customer onboardings end to end
• You've shipped code to production and taken a high-impact architecture decision from proposal to implementation with the team
• You're the first point of contact for engineering and lead day-to-day delivery, keeping the team and company leadership clearly informed
• Every engineer has had a growth conversation with you and knows what they're working toward
• You're running key parts of our ISMS and have handled a customer security review on your own
• You've developed an ambitious view of how AI can change the way we build software, and have started putting it into practice with the team
• You've set next quarter's priorities with company leadership, and everyone understands the product and technical trade-offs

What you should bring

• Deep technical expertise. You've operated at staff+ level or equivalent in an engineering organization with a genuinely high bar.
• Technical and people leadership. You've set a team's technical direction and owned its delivery as tech lead, and line-managed engineers who got better because of you.
• Experience of real growth. You've helped an engineering team through fast growth at a successful startup or scale-up, including hiring and building processes that kept working without you.
• Enterprise B2B experience. You've built products for enterprise customers and earned the trust of their technical and security teams, from integration to due diligence.
• Product and business judgment. You think in business outcomes, aim effort at what matters most, and make sound calls with incomplete information, explaining them clearly to engineers and non-engineers alike.
• High agency. You don't wait for permission or full clarity. You take on problems nobody assigned you, adapt fast when things shift, and see work through to done.
• Ambition with AI. You've already changed how a team works with AI, beyond individual productivity, and have strong ideas about where it goes next.

This role isn't for you if…

• You're looking for a management role where you no longer write code.
• You'd prefer to stay hands-on and not manage people.
• You want to focus on strategy and architecture, without day-to-day delivery.
• You want to focus on day-to-day delivery, without setting and owning the technical direction.
• You're looking to run an established engineering org, not build one.
• You prefer to stay behind the scenes, away from customers and auditors.
• You'd rather build features than invest in the people, processes and tools that expand what the team can deliver.

What we offer

• £120-140k base salary + meaningful equity in a rapidly growing business
• Private health insurance
• 33 days holiday (incl. bank holidays)
• Hybrid working model (3 days/week in our London office)
• Learning and Development budget of £500 per year

Interview process

We move quickly, and we aim to make this a thoughtful, structured experience. It is as much about you assessing us as the other way around.

1. Initial screen (40 min). Intro call to align on your background and the role.
2. Founder screen (40 min). How you act, decide and adapt, and how that translates to a high-agency, fast-moving startup.
3. Take-home task. Practical task to demonstrate product development proficiency.
4. On-site interview (50 min + 50 min). In-person interview including the task review and a system design exercise.
5. Reference checks and offer. We move quickly from references to a clear offer.

If you have any specific questions or want to talk through reasonable adjustments ahead of or during the application, please contact us at any point at hiring@warden-ai.com.

Equal opportunities for everyone

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us, and we are making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Warden AI. We embrace diversity in all of its forms and create an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of supporting the responsible adoption of AI systems.

We're an equal-opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, veteran status, neurodiversity status or disability status.

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