Founding Head of Engineering

Userlink; Odense; Hybrid; DKK 1,000,000 - 1,600,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Technical freedom

Office in Odense

Job summary

Userlink in Odense is seeking a Founding Head of Engineering to own architecture, security, and operations for our AI-powered SaaS platform. You will lead hands-on development and set standards across reviews, testing, monitoring, and releases, while recruiting future engineers.

With equity and direct access to the founder, you’ll shape the product, prioritise features with measurable business impact, and drive scale for dozens of customers through resilient systems and fast iteration.

Qualifications

• Several years of designing and running SaaS systems in production, with ownership of architecture and uptime.
• Solid backend experience in Java or C#, plus React
• LLM-based features shipped to production, with systematic evaluation and improvement
• Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and incident handling
• Understands what the product earns money on and prioritises accordingly, also when the elegant solution has to wait
• AI-assisted development as part of the daily workflow
• Fluent English is mandatory. English is the office language at Userlink

Responsibilities

• Take technical ownership of the platform: architecture, code quality, operations, security and prioritisation, combined with hands-on development every day.
• Set standards for review, testing, monitoring and releases, and recruit the next developers.
• Sit close to the founder and sales, hearing directly what customers pay for and what makes them leave.
• Prioritise with numbers: what ships next moves retention, expansion or new sales.
• Decisions are made on arguments, not titles; ideas are challenged and the best one wins.

Skills

Java

C#

React

LLM features

Cloud infra

CI/CD

Incident handling

English

Tools

Spring Boot

MongoDB

.NET

Job description

Founding Head of Engineering

Full-time Java React LLM Odense Equity

About Userlink

Userlink runs AI agents in production at several hundred Nordic webshops, including Bahne, XL-BYG, Coolshop and Bygma. The agents handle the customer dialogue before and after the purchase, across more than six million visits a month, and every conversation ends up as structured data on demand and purchase barriers. Webshops pay for it every month, and the ones that use it stay. The team is based in Odense, and we already have customers and partners in DACH and the Netherlands.

Why the next two years matter

Today webshops buy Userlink as chat. Email is rolling out now, and phone and social follow. On top of that we are building the brain: a system that brings together every signal about a webshop and its customers, understands why people buy and why they do not, and acts on it while the buyer is still on the page. Every intervention is measured against a control group, so the shop sees the effect in revenue, not in a satisfaction score.

That changes what we sell. Userlink moves from a customer service tool to a product that demonstrably grows the shop's revenue, and revenue per customer can become several times what it is today. The platform you own is what makes that promise true, at hundreds of customers at once. If it is slow, wrong or down, the promise is not worth anything, and neither is the price.

What you build

The agents are the arms. The brain is the next layer: it identifies the moments where a sale is won or lost and intervenes while the session is still live, scores answer coverage per product and closes the gaps, quantifies objections and unmet demand, and traces returns back to the expectation that broke. Learning happens across all webshops, where patterns become visible that no single shop has the traffic to see. The patterns are shared, the data stays with each shop.

The hard problems are retrieval and evaluation of LLM output at scale, data isolation when patterns are shared across customers, latency in real-time flows, and attribution that holds up when a CFO asks. Each of them is a commercial problem too: an agent that answers wrong costs the shop a sale, and an uplift nobody trusts does not get paid for.

The stack

Java with Spring Boot, React and MongoDB, with language models and vector search on top. Moving the backend to C# and .NET is under consideration.

The role

Technical ownership of the platform: architecture, code quality, operations, security and prioritisation, combined with hands‑on development every day. You set the standards for review, testing, monitoring and releases, and you recruit the next developers.

You sit close to the founder and to sales, and you hear directly what customers pay for and what makes them leave. Prioritisation is a commercial decision as much as a technical one, and you make it with the numbers in front of you: what ships next is what moves retention, expansion or new sales. You are measured on that, not on the number of releases.

Decisions are made on arguments, not titles. Ideas get challenged regardless of where they come from, and the best one wins.

Why founding

You do not step into a finished tech organisation with fixed processes. The standards for review, testing, operations and releases, and the developers you hire, become the foundation the platform and the team grow on.

That is why the role comes with equity. You help build the company, and you own part of what you build. The equity is worth what the company becomes, and the platform is the biggest lever on that. In return we expect you to take responsibility like a co‑owner, also when things are unclear or go wrong.

Profile

• Several years of designing and running SaaS systems in production, with ownership of architecture and uptime
• Solid backend experience in Java or C#, plus React
• LLM‑based features shipped to production, with systematic evaluation and improvement
• Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and incident handling
• Understands what the product earns money on and prioritises accordingly, also when the elegant solution has to wait
• AI‑assisted development as part of the daily workflow
• Fluent English is mandatory. English is the office language at Userlink

The person

• Dreams of owning and building a company
• Ideally has tried starting something and knows what it takes
• Thinks like a founder, not an employee
• Happily gives more than a regular job asks for, because it is fun
• Says things as they are, and can take the same in return
• Takes ownership and looks for solutions rather than excuses
• Curious, learns fast and has a positive mindset

What we offer

• Competitive salary
• Equity
• Short decision paths and a high degree of technical freedom
• Office at Storms Pakhus in Odense

Contact

Phone: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Userlink ApS

Ejlskovsgade 13

5000 Odense

VAT no.: 44867079