Head of Engineering

Palo IT; Paris; Hybrid; EUR 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo IT Labs seeks a Head of Engineering to translate strategy into daily execution, lead the AI engineering community, and ensure every team-client-facing or product-side-delivers at the highest standard.

Reporting to the CTO, you own day-to-day engineering health, standards, roadmap execution, and the development of our AI engineers; you are the technical authority guiding architecture governance and AI governance across squads.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering organizations and defining strategy.
• Strong background in AI/ML engineering and governance.
• Proven ability to implement robust CI/CD practices and high-quality standards.

Responsibilities

• Translate strategy into daily execution across engineering teams.
• Lead the AI engineering community and ensure high-quality delivery for client and product work.
• Own engineering standards, roadmap execution, and orchestration across squads.

Skills

Leadership

AI governance

CI/CD

Architectural leadership

People management

Tools

Git

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Unlock your future:
your journey starts here!

Building the AI-first frontier enterprise.

We are a global technology consultancy with a trademarked, AI-first approach-Gen-e2. It redefines how enterprises build digital products and transform their organizations with AI. We do the right thing, and we do it right. We're proud to be a World Economic Forum New Champion, and a B Corp-certified company.

We are small enough to care locally, big enough to deliver globally (10 countries, 450+ experts from 50+ nationalities)

We are becoming an agentic organization, adopting the AI-native operating model we bring to our clients

We are robust and resilient (100% independent, 0 debt, founded 2009)

We are AI-native professionals who invest in what we believe and work as a collective intelligence

We are positive, courageous and deliver at the leading edge

Your Role

As Head of Engineering at PALO IT Labs, reporting directly to the CTO, you are the operational engine of our engineering organisation. You translate strategy into daily execution, lead our AI engineering community, and ensure every team-client-facing or product-side-delivers at the highest standard.

Where the CTO sets direction and makes structural architectural decisions, you make those decisions real. You own the day-to-day: team health, engineering standards, roadmap execution, and the development of our AI engineers. You are the technical authority your teams rely on to unblock, challenge and grow-while the CTO focuses on vision, key clients, and long-term positioning.

Deploy the Gen-e2 technology roadmap defined by the CTO: architecture governance, AI governance, and factory standards (agents, prompts, rules, pipelines) across all squads

Own the token economics of our delivery, balancing model cost, latency and quality across squads, so AI-first means production-grade, not prototype-grade

Operate one level above Lead Engineers: arbitrate divergences, challenge local decisions, spot systemic debt and keep the bar rising as execution becomes increasingly agentic

Deploy on our most complex client engagements as the senior technical authority: design AI-first architectures and see them through to production-you ship, not slide decks

Step in as Tech Lead on client projects when needed: if a mission requires it, you can take the technical lead role directly, ensuring continuity and quality without waiting for a resource to be available

Define and enforce engineering standards: CI/CD practices, code reviews, incident management, and security posture across squads

Own technical incidents and escalations with clear ownership and post-mortems

People & Community

Directly manage Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) and later AI tech leads and - their growth, performance, workload and career paths are yours

Own the engineering community’s rituals end to end: critiques, showcases, community days, learning circles and the shared knowledge base that keeps them visible, inclusive and connected to real delivery challenges

Foster cross-project collaboration by connecting engineers facing