Head of Engineering

Our Mission

Join us in shaping the future of paid search intelligence.

Adthena is an award-winning search intelligence platform powered by patented AI technology and a team of dedicated experts. We help brands marketers and agencies dominate their competitive landscapes with unparalleled insights into the paid search market. Our Whole Market View Smart Monitor and Local View solutions give clients the clarity to optimize spend increase ROI and stay ahead of the competition.

Trusted by global brands like Citibank LOréal and Volvo and backed by Updata Partners weve been redefining search intelligence since 2012.

In 2025 Adthena continued its winning streak earning 8 major search industry awards. Highlights include Best AI Search Software Solution at the US Search Awards Best Search Software Tool at the European Search Awards and Best Software Innovation at the Global Search Awards.

Ready to make an impact in an industry-leading company Lets do it together.

Why Join Us

We offer the best of both worlds: the maturity and stability of a well-established company combined with the energy agility and impact of a scaling tech organisation.

If youve been hesitant about joining a typical tech company due to concerns about chaos fragility or volatility Adthena is your answer.

• Were smaller than large-scale enterprises offering more autonomy less red tape and accelerated growth.

Heres what we offer:

• Startup Engineering culture

• Strong Culture: Our quarterly surveys show a 93% average approval rating for company culture with an overall eNPS of 27.

• Award-Winning Product: Best AI Search Software Solution Global Search Award 2024

• Stock Options: Our employees do incredible work so as we grow everyone shares the rewards.

• Trust-Based Vacation: Take as much time off as you need when you need it.

• Remote-First: 52% of Adthenians work fully remote with others choosing Hybrid Work at our 3 Geohubs (London Austin Sydney).

• Flexible Work: Work how and where you do your best with full autonomy over your day.

• Career Growth: Bespoke training and career development via Sherpa plans to guide your growth.

• Monthly Hackdays & Training Days

• Private Medical Insurance: Fully covered health care.

• Mental Health Support: Employee Assistance Program offering 24/7 confidential counselling with access to healthier living services such as HeadSpace.

• Family Care Package: Up to 6 months fully paid maternity leave and 2 months paternity leave.

• Pension: Competitive UK pension scheme available from day one.

• Home Office Stipend: $200 for your ideal remote setup.

• Swag Welcome Gift: $70 credit to grab some merch.

• Birthday Day Off: Celebrate your special day.

• Regular Socials: Summer & Christmas parties annual and quarterly offsites monthly meet-ups. See here for more info.

• Volunteer Days: Make a difference with paid volunteer time each quarter. See here for more info.

About the Role

Reporting to: Paul Felby Chief Tech & Product Officer

Teams: Data Engineering (Scala/Spark) Data Science Business Intelligence Web (React) QA DevOps

Location: Remote United Kingdom

Start Date: ASAP

More info: See FAQ below our candidate hub or reach out to

What youll do at Adthena

This role offers the opportunity to lead engineering at a company operating at the intersection of large-scale data machine learning and the rapid evolution of search. Adthena works with some of the worlds largest brands to provide competitive intelligence across traditional search platforms and the emerging generation of LLM-driven search experiences including Google ChatGPT Perplexity and Gemini.

As Head of Engineering you will be responsible for the technical execution behind a platform that processes vast volumes of search data runs complex distributed computations and delivers enterprise-grade insights used daily by global marketing teams. The challenge is not greenfield experimentation but building scaling and evolving systems that already matter and extending them into entirely new areas.

You will step into an organisation where AI is already part of how software gets built. We were early adopters and are now a leading company in this space. Engineering teams use AI day-to-day to write review and evolve code. This role carries ownership of taking those practices further setting standards shaping ways of working and helping define what effective AI-assisted development looks like at scale.

A significant part of the opportunity lies in shaping how Adthena expands competitive intelligence beyond Google into LLM-driven search platforms. This involves leading the development of new systems that help enterprises understand visibility competition and opportunity in search experiences that are rapidly becoming mainstream.

GenAI is embedded throughout the product and platform from analysing complex datasets to backend verification and labelling workflows to generating insights and dashboards for clients. As Head of Engineering you will play a key role in guiding how these capabilities are designed operationalised and scaled to deliver consistent reliable value.

As Adthena continues to grow this role is central to strengthening the engineering organisation accelerating delivery and ensuring the technical foundations support sustained innovation high quality and long-term scale.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own the engineering roadmap execution for all products and platform capabilities.

• Join architectural discussion regarding direction for distributed data processing ML pipelines and web application architecture.

• Ensure scalable reliable systems that can handle massive datasets and evolving ML workloads.

• Champion engineering best practices (testing observability CI/CD incident response documentation).

Delivery & Execution

• Establish predictable delivery processes across all teams improving speed without sacrificing stability.

• Implement measurable engineering KPIs such as cycle time deployment frequency MTTR and platform SLAs.

• Drive continuous improvement in release quality through QA automation and DevOps collaboration.

Leadership & People Management

• Lead and mentor direct reports; create a culture of ownership accountability and high performance.

• Build an engineering organisation that scales. hiring role definitions and career paths.

• Foster a healthy collaborative environment that supports deep technical work and cross-team alignment.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product to prioritise work refine requirements and ensure successful product delivery.

• Work closely with Data Science/ML teams to bring research into production-grade systems.

• Collaborate with DevOps/SRE on infrastructure strategy cost optimisation and operational reliability.

Strategic Contribution

• Contribute to the company-wide technology strategy alongside the CTO.

• Identify opportunities to accelerate innovation through tooling platform investments or architectural change.

• Manage engineering budgets tooling spend cloud infrastructure cost and vendor relationships.

Who we look for

Research shows men apply if they meet 60% of the criteria while women and underrepresented groups apply only if they meet all requirements. If you have the skills but dont meet every requirement reach out wed love to explore how you could be a great fit!

Required Experience:

Technical Experience

• Proven leadership of multi-team engineering organisations (20 engineers).

• Strong background in distributed systems high-scale data pipelines and ML model deployment.

• Deep understanding of modern data stacks. e.g Spark data bricks and cloud-native architectures.

• Previous experience working with Data Science teams and understanding how machine learning models are delivered.

• Strong grasp of TypeScript/React or at least modern front-end engineering environments.

• Solid experience with DevOps practices: CI/CD pipelines containerisation orchestration monitoring and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).

Leadership & Management

• Experience running engineering organisations with multiple disciplines (backend web data ML QA DevOps).

• Demonstrated ability to build high-performing teams and coach strong engineering managers.

• Excellent judgment around trade-offs between delivery speed tech debt stability and innovation.

• Comfortable in a fast-paced SaaS environment with enterprise customers and high expectations for product reliability.

Soft Skills

• Outstanding communication: clear concise and effective with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Highly organised with strong planning and prioritisation ability.

• Bias for action with a pragmatic problem-solving mindset.

• Values transparency collaboration and developer happiness.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with search engines advertising technology or competitive intelligence products.

• Familiarity with ML lifecycle tooling (feature stores model deployment platforms pipeline orchestration).

• Experience with agentic coding

Our Core Values

All Adthenians are expected to align closely with our Core Values.

What it means...

• Get Shit Done: Were big on taking action owning our challenges and finding solutions.

• Freedom with Responsibility: We take charge of results to recognition. We know that our hustle not only moves the needle for the company but also sets us up for personal success.

• Deliver Remarkable Quality: We care about exceeding expectations in the work we do and aim to always do our best work as individuals and as a team.

• Smart & Always Improving: We strive daily to expand our knowledge and become better at what we do.

Meet your teammates

Youll work closely with:

Paul Felby
Title: Chief Product & Tech Officer
LinkedIn: Experience:

Director