Head of Engineering

The Headhunter LTD Albania, daughter company of The Headhunter Group, has been entrusted by a leading international technology brand operating in Albania to find a strong and hands-on The Enterprise Architecture & Technology Lead.

Role Overview
We are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead and develop our existing engineering team of approximately 10–15
people in Tirana. This role is accountable for the people, operating model, and engineering outcomes behind
NextGen AI's platform: delivery, quality, reliability, security, and engineering effectiveness.
You will strengthen the engineering function, hire and develop talent, and help multiple teams progress from forming
to performing. You will establish effective Agile ways of working and move the organisation toward high-performing
continuous delivery and deployment, with clear ownership from design through production.
The Principal Engineer/Architect will report to the Head of Engineering. The Principal Engineer/Architect will provide deep technical and architectural leadership, while the Head of Engineering remains accountable for the
organisation's people, execution, standards, and overall engineering outcomes.
This role requires a credible engineering leader who has personally built software in a high-performing Agile team
and can combine technical depth with strong people leadership and sound business judgement.
Key Responsibilities
Lead the Engineering Organisation
Lead, coach, and develop an existing team of 10–15 engineers, including the Principal Engineer/Architect and other
technical leaders.
Establish clear team structures, responsibilities, career paths, performance expectations, and succession plans.
Hire and onboard strong engineering talent as the organisation grows.
Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, technical excellence, continuous learning, and constructive challenge.
Partner with Product and business leadership to align priorities, capacity, technical investment, and delivery
commitments.
Build High-Performing Agile Teams
Implement and continuously improve practical Agile ways of working across multiple teams.
Guide teams through forming, storming, norming, and performing by creating clarity, trust, effective team agreements,
and strong decision-making.
Improve delivery flow, predictability, feedback loops, and cross-team coordination without unnecessary process.
Establish meaningful measures of engineering effectiveness and use them to remove systemic constraints.
Create teams that can plan, deliver, operate, learn, and improve with increasing autonomy.
Own Delivery, Quality, Security, and Reliability
Lead the move toward continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, with controls
appropriate to the product and customer risk.
Establish and continuously improve the secure software development life cycle (SSDLC), including threat modelling,
secure design, dependency management, access controls, vulnerability remediation, and incident response.
Ensure teams build and operate highly available, resilient, observable, and supportable services.
Set expectations for automated testing and practices such as TDD, BDD, pair programming, code review, and small,
reversible changes.
Establish clear production ownership, operational readiness, monitoring, incident management, and blameless
learning.
Balance delivery speed with quality, security, reliability, cost, maintainability, and technical debt.
Guide Architecture, DevOps, and AI Engineering
Lead the Principal Engineer/Architect and technical leads in turning technical strategy into executable plans and
consistent engineering standards.
Ensure teams apply appropriate architectural patterns for APIs, distributed systems, event-driven services, data,
integrations, scalability, and resilience.
Establish effective technical governance while keeping decisions close to the teams doing the work.
Strengthen DevOps practices, including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, reproducible environments, observability,
release automation, and secure platform operations.
Advance AI-assisted and AI-native engineering practices to improve productivity, quality, and developer experience.
Establish Continuous AI practices for managing models, prompts, data, evaluations, releases, monitoring, and
production feedback.
Ensure agentic systems are evaluated through automated evals, regression testing, safety checks, quality thresholds,
and real-world performance monitoring.
Guide the secure and reliable use of Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A) patterns, and other relevant
integration standards.
Provide Clear Engineering Leadership
Give leadership an accurate view of delivery confidence, engineering health, reliability, security, staffing, risks, and
investment needs.
Communicate technical options and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Build effective relationships with customers, partners, and vendors where engineering leadership is required.
Make timely decisions in an environment of growth, ambiguity, and changing priorities.
Experience and Qualifications
Significant software engineering experience, including hands-on experience in a high-performing Agile team.
Proven experience leading and line-managing an engineering organisation of approximately 10–15 people.
Experience developing existing teams and hiring talent to expand an engineering function.
Demonstrated success implementing Agile across multiple teams and moving teams from forming to performing.
Experience leading teams toward continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
Strong practical knowledge of SSDLC, automated testing, TDD, BDD, pair programming, and production ownership.
Experience delivering and operating highly available, secure, and observable platforms.
Strong understanding of architectural patterns, distributed systems, APIs, cloud-native platforms, and technical trade-
offs.
Practical experience with IaC, DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure automation.
Experience with AI-assisted development, AI-native products, or Continuous AI practices.
Experience building or operating agentic AI systems and evaluating agents through automated evals.
Working knowledge of MCP and A2A, including their implications for integration, security, governance, and reliability.
Strong coaching, performance management, hiring, communication, and stakeholder leadership skills.
Clear written and verbal communication in English.
Desirable Experience
Experience scaling a product engineering organisation through rapid growth or change.
Experience building enterprise SaaS or AI platforms for regulated or security-sensitive customers.
Experience establishing platform engineering, developer experience, SRE, or security capabilities.
Experience managing engineering managers as well as senior individual contributors.
Experience working across international or distributed teams.

How to Apply:

Our client is an Equal Opportunity Employer and welcomes applications from all qualified individuals regardless of gender, nationality, age, religion, or background.

If you meet the requirements and are ready to take on this exciting challenge, please apply directly here.