Head of Engineering

Odin; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Wellness budget

Parental leave

Pension

Time Off

Work From Anywhere

Birthday Leave

Job summary

Odin is building the investment infrastructure for private markets. We’re hiring our founding Head of Engineering to shape an engineering org from six to 15-20 and drive high-agency delivery in a revenue-generating, post-PMF stage.

This role blends hands-on coding with leadership: you own feature delivery, engineering standards, and killer product velocity while mentoring the team, forging partnerships with banking and KYC vendors, and ensuring strict reliability across jurisdictions.

Responsibilities

• Engineering execution: own features and critical system decisions.
• Engineering standards: code quality, testing, reviews, docs, on-call.
• Performance management: direct feedback and high standards.
• Hiring and team growth: scale from six to 15-20 engineers.
• AI productivity: translate AI gains into team-level outcomes.
• Engineering reliability: pre-mortems, on-call, incident response.
• Working with Product: align on what and why we ship.
• Technical partner relationships: banking, KYC, custodians, vendors.

Job description

About Odin

Odin is building the investment infrastructure for the future of private markets.
We believe capital is one of the most powerful tools for shaping the world - and more people should know how to put it to work. Our mission is to make it radically easier to raise and deploy capital, so that anyone, anywhere, can back the companies and ideas they believe in.

Our first product is a full-stack platform for launching and running private investment firms, allowing you to run everything from your phone - think Shopify for VC and PE. We handle all the infrastructure: from legal structuring and investor onboarding to KYC/AML, payments, tax, reporting, and exits.

We're already trusted by over 10,000 angels, VCs, and founders. We administer over $750m in assets, covering investments from pre-seed to series E. This includes household names like ElevenLabs, OpenAI, SpaceX, xAI, Anduril, etc. but also new companies creating everything from synthetic brains to small nuclear reactors.

The Role

This is the role for an engineer with high agency, a disdain for bureaucracy, and an instinct to drive things forward without waiting for structure to be put in place. If you've been senior at a slow-moving company and you're frustrated by the gap between what should be possible and what actually ships, this is the antidote.

Odin is post-PMF, revenue-generating, and preparing to scale into the US. We're hiring our founding Head of Engineering.At our stage there's no such thing as a leader who isn't hands-on. The strongest technical contributor in the room should be you. We don't have capacity for non-technical middle management.

Responsibilities

• Engineering execution. Accountable for what engineering ships and how. About half the role is hands-on in the codebase - owning features and the harder calls in the system.

• Engineering standards. Code quality, testing, code review, documentation, post-mortems, on-call - the bar gets set here, and held.

• Performance management. Give direct, specific, technical feedback quickly when someone isn't performing, and make the hard calls. Grow people through high standards and direct feedback - not frameworks, PIPs, or formal coaching programmes.

• Hiring and team growth. Hiring, onboarding, and developing engineers as the team grows from six to ~15-20 over the next two years.

• AI productivity. Turning individual AI productivity gains into team-level output that customers feel - through how the team works, what gets built, and what gets measured.

• Engineering reliability. Root-cause discipline, pre-mortems before customer-facing launches, on-call, incident response - the practices that make shipping bug-free a system, not a hope. Especially important given the financial accuracy required across multiple jurisdictions.

• Working with Product. Product owns what we ship; engineering owns how it's built so we can ship regularly and reliably. The answers to "why is it built this way?" live here.

• Technical partner relationships. Engineering counterpart on banking, KYC, custodians, and vendor diligence. Build-vs-buy calls sit here too.

The kind of person who thrives here

The right person is intense in the best way: action-oriented, curious, direct, and frustrated by slow delivery. A through-and-through builder - you still write code in your spare time, you're naturally pulled to the hardest problems, and you can't stop until you've shipped the solution.

Senior engineers respect you because you've earned it through your work, not because of your title. They want to be managed by you because you're the strongest engineer in the room and the one who gives direct, useful feedback. You can call something out and have it taken on board - the team already knows you're brilliant at the actual work. Feedback runs both ways: just as direct when it's coming at you.

Weighing engineering decisions by customer impact, not engineering aesthetics. The question is "how does this actually affect the customers of the business?" - not "is this technically nice."

Pragmatic risk judgement: engineering effort proportional to consequence. Comfortable saying "this is fine" when risk is genuinely low; equally comfortable holding the line where money or compliance is involved.

Tailoring communication to the audience - engineers, product, leadership, founders. Same person, different register. You ask questions until things genuinely make sense; "disagree and commit" while still confused isn't your move.

If you've built engineering before - as a founder, a CTO, a Head of Engineering, or an engineering leader without the formal title - this is the chance to do it at the right stage. Post-PMF, revenue-generating, six engineers, plenty still to figure out, and the engineering org genuinely yours to shape. If you hear someone has 50x'd their output with AI and your instinct is to dig in rather than scoff, even better.

Bottom line

This role shapes how engineering grows at Odin - what gets shipped, how it gets shipped, who joins, who stays, and what we expect of each other. The team will rise to meet the bar you set. Your job is to make sure the bar is high enough to matter, and to hold it.

The Hiring Process

Our process is entirely real-time - no take-home assignments, no async tasks. We want to see how you actually think and work, including how you use AI in your day-to-day. The final stages happen in-person.

1. You start with a call with Imani, our Head of People, to unpack the role and learn more about us.

2. Then a few different conversations with Mary, Paddy, and our external technical advisor - covering culture and values, working through real technical problems together, and digging into how you think about hiring, performance management, and technical depth.

The process typically runs over two weeks. We share detailed feedback within 24 hours of each stage and aim to line up next steps quickly so momentum isn't lost.

Salary

The salary band for this role is £140,000 - £170,000 + equity options. During the hiring process, we'll assess your experience and capabilities to determine your starting salary.

Working at Odin

Two setups work for this role: London hybrid (three days a week in the office) or remote from elsewhere in the UK with quarterly trips to London.

Benefits

• Health: Private health insurance (Vitality), paid sick leave including support for pregnancy loss and fertility treatments, and access to Spill for mental health support

• Wellness: £1,000 annual budget for health, therapy or fitness

• Parental Leave: Enhanced maternity, adoption, paternity and partner leave

• Pension: 4% employer contribution with salary sacrifice options

• Time Off: 25 days annual leave, 2 wellness days and flexible bank holidays (33 days total)

• Work From Anywhere: Up to 6 weeks per year working from anywhere globally

• Birthday Leave: An additional day of leave