Head of Application Engineering

poolside; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI development company in the United Kingdom is seeking a Head of Application Engineering to lead user-facing applications. This role involves managing a remote team, driving technical excellence, and implementing best practices in software development. The ideal candidate will have experience scaling engineering teams, delivering on roadmap commitments, and a strong technical background. The position offers fully remote work and flexible hours, along with generous benefits including 37 days of vacation per year.

Benefits

Fully remote work

37 days/year of vacation & holidays

Health insurance allowance

Company-provided equipment

Wellbeing and home office allowances

Frequent team get-togethers

Inclusive culture

Qualifications

• Experience managing and scaling remote engineering teams.
• Strong technical background relevant to product development.
• Excellent communication and coaching skills.

Responsibilities

• Deliver applications for engineers globally.
• Lead and manage a product engineering team.
• Implement engineering best practices.

Skills

Managing remote engineering teams

Building developer-first products

People management skills

Organizational skills

Technical decision guidance

Delivering roadmap commitments

Job description

About Poolside

In this decade, the world will create artificial intelligence that reaches human level intelligence (and beyond) by combining learning and search. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will determine who survives and wins. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research and engineering at scale. They will create powerful economic engines. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this.

Poolside exists to be one of these companies - to build a world where AI will drive the majority of economically valuable work and scientific progress.

We believe that software development will be the first major capability in neural networks that reaches human-level intelligence because it's the domain where we can combine Search and Learning approaches the best.

At Poolside, we believe our applied research needs to culminate in products that are put in the hands of people. Today, we focus on building for a developer-led increasingly AI-assisted world. We believe that current capabilities of AI lead to incredible tooling that can assist developers in their day to day work. We also believe that as we increase the capabilities of our models, we increasingly empower anyone in the world to be able to build software. We envision a future where not 100 million people can build software but 2 billion people can.

About Our Team

We are a remote-first team that sits across Europe and North America and comes together once a month in-person for 3 days and for longer offsites twice a year.

Our R&D and production teams are a combination of more research and more engineering-oriented profiles, however, everyone deeply cares about the quality of the systems we build and has a strong underlying knowledge of software development. We believe that good engineering leads to faster development iterations, which allows us to compound our efforts.

About The Role

We are looking for a Head of Application Engineering to lead the Applications team. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will oversee and drive all user-facing applications of Poolside. Today, these include a range of Poolside Assistants deployed directly on the most popular IDEs. Soon, a product suite that allows engineers everywhere to manage and orchestrate their agents and workflows.

YOUR MISSION

Pioneer the application layer that brings our foundation models to the world. You will build products that begin with revolutionizing software development—through developer tools and enterprise agent platforms—and later expand to all knowledge work done behind a computer. Your team will craft experiences that act as a multiplier for the capabilities of our foundation models, whether for a developer debugging code, an enterprise automating software engineering workflows, or for new use cases we haven’t imagined yet.

Responsibilities

• Deliver the best applications for engineers across the globe
• Lead and manage a team of product engineers dedicated to the different applications
• Lead and execute the strategic direction you will set together with the VP of Engineering
• Implement and follow engineering best practices across the organisation
• Partner with product, design, other engineering teams and GTM to ensure alignment
• Drive technical excellence and scalability in our architecture and systems
• Hire, develop, and retain top engineering talent
• Monitor engineering performance through metrics and ensure continuous process improvement

Skills & Experience

• We care deeply about our team–previous experience managing and scaling (remote) engineering teams and driving delivery is key
• Experience building dev-first products and tools
• Strong technical background and ability to guide and advise on technical decisions for the team
• Strong people management skills, with experience coaching engineering teams (including IC’s, managers or leads)
• Excellent organisational and execution skills, with a track record of delivering on roadmap commitments
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, high-growth environments

Benefits

• Fully remote work & flexible hours
• 37 days/year of vacation & holidays
• Health insurance allowance for you and dependents
• Company-provided equipment
• Wellbeing, always-be-learning and home office allowances
• Frequent team get togethers
• Great diverse & inclusive people-first culture