Head of Engineering

CarbonChain; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

CarbonChain is seeking a Head of Engineering to lead our growing engineering team in London. You will own the technical direction, architecture, quality standards, delivery processes, and the team itself, while balancing speed with the need for auditable, reliable systems.

This leadership role emphasizes strategy over hands-on coding, with a focus on AI-enabled development and enterprise collaboration. You will mentor engineers, shape QA practices, and drive a culture of ownership and customer

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in software engineering, including significant…

Responsibilities

• Own technical strategy and decision-making: set the direction for our platform, make and document key technical decisions, and keep engineering aligned with company goals as they evolve
• Steer architectural decisions across our system, from ingestion pipelines and provenance tracking to CBAM data sharing workflows, so that what we build is scalable, reliable, and audit-ready
• Build, coach, and nurture the team through hiring, onboarding, regular 1:1s, career development, and performance management, creating an environment where engineers do their best work and want to stay
• Own quality across engineering by defining our QA strategy, testing approach, and code review practices. You won't review every PR, but you'll make sure reviews are consistent, effective, and uphold our standards
• Build and maintain an engineering process playbook covering how we plan, scope, ship, handle incidents, and learn from retrospectives, and mature it as the team grows without adding unnecessary bureaucracy
• Make sure priorities are well maintained and balanced by working with Product, Sales, Customer Success, and the Carbon Team to agree trade-offs between new features, technical debt, reliability, and customer commitments
• Lead AI adoption in the engineering team, through AI-assisted development, tooling, and workflows, and across the wider business, identifying high-value opportunities and setting sensible guardrails given the sensitivity of customer data
• Act as the face of technology at CarbonChain: join client calls where needed, explain our architecture and data handling to enterprise customers, and support security and procurement conversations
• Partner with the leadership team on headcount planning, engineering budget, tooling, and infrastructure costs
• Champion a culture of ownership, pragmatism, and customer focus, staying comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities while keeping the long-term picture in mind

Job description

About CarbonChain

The fight against Climate Change is evolving rapidly. Climate tech is changing. The first wave was reporting. The next is treating carbon the way companies treat money: as a way to decide what to buy, who to sell to, and which incentives to claim. Around the world, carbon is becoming a condition of trade. Border taxes, free allocations, green premiums, cheaper capital. It looks a lot like the post-war rebuild: governments put capital and tax incentives on the table, and the companies that could keep the books moved first. The missing piece then was bookkeeping. The missing piece now is the same, carbon accounting. CarbonChain is that bookkeeping. We turn messy, real-world supply-chain data into numbers a trader, a sustainability lead, or a CFO will actually use. We want people who are agents of change, who feel the impact of climate change and know there is no way around it to create a better future for every being. People who know the customer is the truth of how a company thrives. People who treat data as the fuel for how fast society can change. People who use AI to accelerate the cause for good by working through an AI lens first to automate repetitive tasks and analyse data. Finally, people who enjoy working with people.

Our Product

We help the world's largest commodity producers and traders measure and cut emissions, with verified primary data where we can get it and defensible defaults where we cannot. The platform turns operational and supplier files into decision-grade carbon and compliance insight: sourcing, CBAM, product and corporate footprints, reporting customers and regulators will stand behind.

We organise carbon accounting around the user in four contexts at once:

• Immediate: the tools in front of them
• Internal: how they work with colleagues
• External: how they work with suppliers and customers
• Societal: how they work with society, governments, and disclosing bodies

The data we hold is only useful if it makes all four of those jobs easier.

Head of Engineering

About the Role

We're looking for a Head of Engineering to lead our engineering team through its next stage of growth. Reporting to CEO, you'll own how we build: our technical direction, architecture, quality standards, delivery process, and, most importantly, the team itself. This is a leadership role rather than a hands-on coding one. Your impact will come through the decisions you steer, the standards you set, and the engineers you hire and grow. You'll still need deep technical credibility to challenge designs, weigh trade-offs, and earn the trust of engineers and customers alike. As a startup, we move fast and make pragmatic decisions. You'll balance speed with quality in a domain where data accuracy, auditability, and trust are non-negotiable. You'll also act as the voice of technology across the business and with our customers, and help shape how CarbonChain uses AI, both in engineering and across the company.

What You'll Do

• Own technical strategy and decision-making: set the direction for our platform, make and document key technical decisions, and keep engineering aligned with company goals as they evolve
• Steer architectural decisions across our system, from ingestion pipelines and provenance tracking to CBAM data sharing workflows, so that what we build is scalable, reliable, and audit-ready
• Build, coach, and nurture the team through hiring, onboarding, regular 1:1s, career development, and performance management, creating an environment where engineers do their best work and want to stay
• Own quality across engineering by defining our QA strategy, testing approach, and code review practices. You won't review every PR, but you'll make sure reviews are consistent, effective, and uphold our standards
• Build and maintain an engineering process playbook covering how we plan, scope, ship, handle incidents, and learn from retrospectives, and mature it as the team grows without adding unnecessary bureaucracy
• Make sure priorities are well maintained and balanced by working with Product, Sales, Customer Success, and the Carbon Team to agree trade-offs between new features, technical debt, reliability, and customer commitments
• Lead AI adoption in the engineering team, through AI-assisted development, tooling, and workflows, and across the wider business, identifying high-value opportunities and setting sensible guardrails given the sensitivity of customer data
• Act as the face of technology at CarbonChain: join client calls where needed, explain our architecture and data handling to enterprise customers, and support security and procurement conversations
• Partner with the leadership team on headcount planning, engineering budget, tooling, and infrastructure costs
• Champion a culture of ownership, pragmatism, and customer focus, staying comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities while keeping the long-term picture in mind

What We're Looking For

Extensive experience in software engineering, including significant…