Head of Engineering

Smart Bricks; Greater London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Smart Bricks, London-based, is seeking an exceptional Head of Engineering to build the engineering organisation and the technical foundations of an AI-native real estate platform. You will own architecture, engineering standards, and cloud infrastructure, working directly with the Founder, Head of Product and Head of Applied AI to convert complex workflows into scalable software.

Initially hands-on and deeply technical, you will recruit and lead an outstanding team, setting hiring bars and

Qualifications

• Proven track record building AI-scale infrastructure.
• Strong architecture and design capabilities.
• Leadership experience in scaling engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the founding London engineering team.
• Define hiring bar, principles, practices and culture from day one.
• Own the platform architecture and infrastructure for an AI-native product.
• Hands-on coding and architecture decisions in early days; scale with the team.
• Collaborate with CEO, Head of Product and Head of Applied AI to turn workflows into scalable software.
• Ensure security, reliability, observability and performance at scale.

Skills

AI infrastructure

Distributed systems

Leadership

Software architecture

Cloud

Job description

Build the Engineering Organisation Powering AI for Real Estate

Location: London

About Smart Bricks

Smart Bricks is building the intelligence layer for real estate.

Every year, trillions of dollars are invested across residential, commercial and alternative real estate using fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual workflows. We're building an AI-native platform that enables investors, developers, lenders, governments and Fortune 500 companies to source opportunities, underwrite investments, perform due diligence and manage portfolios using AI.

Alongside our software platform, we're building an Applied AI Lab that works directly with some of the world's largest real estate organisations to redesign complex institutional workflows using AI.

Every customer engagement generates institutional knowledge. Every deployment strengthens the platform. Every improvement compounds across every future customer.

We’ve raised over $5 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and are backed by some of the world’s leading technology ecosystems, including Techstars, Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft through their AI and startup programmes.

We’re now building our founding leadership team in London. Our London team is based at Balderton Capital, one of Europe’s leading venture capital firms, putting us alongside some of Europe’s most ambitious founders, investors and technology companies.

We’re looking for an exceptional Head of Engineering to build the engineering organisation and technical foundations behind the next generation of Smart Bricks.

Why exceptional engineers join us

$5M+ raised, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

Backed by Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Techstars

Building our core team in London at Balderton Capital

Building production AI agents and infrastructure, not another LLM wrapper

Solving problems for some of the world’s largest real estate organisations

Opportunity to build an engineering organisation from the ground up

The Role

This isn’t a role for someone who wants to manage an established engineering organisation.

You’ll build one.

As Head of Engineering, you’ll own the technical foundations of Smart Bricks: the architecture, engineering organisation, infrastructure and standards that underpin everything we build.

You’ll work directly with the Founder & CEO, Head of Product and Head of Applied AI to turn complex institutional workflows into scalable AI-native software.

In the early days, you’ll be deeply hands‑on: writing production code, making architecture decisions, reviewing pull requests, debugging systems and shipping alongside the team.

As we scale, you’ll recruit and lead an exceptional engineering organisation around you.

The decisions you make in your first year will influence every product we build, every enterprise customer we serve and every engineer who joins after you.

What You’ll Own

Build the Engineering Organisation

Recruit and lead the founding engineering team in London.

You’ll define our hiring bar, engineering principles, development practices and technical culture from the beginning.

We’re building a culture centred around:

• Ownership and craftsmanship
• First-principles thinking
• Simplicity and pragmatism
• Speed without sacrificing quality
• High agency and low ego

The goal is simple: build an engineering organisation where exceptional people do the best work of their careers.

Architect the Smart Bricks Platform

Own the technical architecture of our institutional AI platform.

You’ll design foundations that allow us to experiment rapidly today without constraining what Smart Bricks can become tomorrow.

That includes:

• Agent orchestration and workflow engines
• Knowledge and retrieval infrastructure
• Data and reasoning systems
• Enterprise APIs and integrations
• Evaluation infrastructure
• Observability and monitoring
• Security and permissions
• Cloud and deployment infrastructure

You’ll make the architectural decisions that determine how the platform scales across customers, markets, asset classes and use cases.

Build AI‑Native Infrastructure

Traditional SaaS architecture isn’t enough for what we’re building.

You’ll design infrastructure for software in which AI agents reason, retrieve information, call tools, execute workflows and collaborate with humans.

That means building and making pragmatic decisions around:

• Agent execution and orchestration
• Multi-agent systems
• Memory and context management
• Retrieval and knowledge systems
• Tool calling and MCP
• Evaluation and reliability

We care about what works in production, not what’s fashionable.

Our Applied AI Lab works directly with customers on some of their hardest problems.

Your job is to turn what we learn into product infrastructure.

You’ll work closely with the Head of Applied AI to continuously answer:

What should become part of the platform?

A workflow solved for one customer should become a capability we can deploy for hundreds.

Over time, new enterprise deployments should increasingly be powered by reusable platform capabilities rather than bespoke engineering.

Build for Enterprise Scale

Our customers trust us with high-value investment decisions, proprietary data and mission‑critical workflows.

Enterprise quality therefore isn’t something we add later.

You’ll build for:

• Reliability and performance
• Security and data isolation
• Explainability and provenance
• Auditability
• Observability
• Scalability
• Extensibility

The foundations you build should become one of Smart Bricks’ greatest competitive advantages.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months, you’ll have:

• Designed and launched the first generation of the Smart Bricks institutional AI platform
• Built the founding engineering team in London
• Established the engineering culture, principles and technical standards of the company
• Created reusable platform capabilities from customer deployments
• Significantly reduced the engineering effort required to onboard new enterprise customers
• Established world‑class evaluation, observability and reliability practices for our AI systems
• Become the trusted technical counterpart to the Founder, Product and Applied AI
• Built the foundations for an engineering organisation capable of scaling from a handful of exceptional engineers to dozens

Success won’t be measured by lines of code.

It will be measured by how quickly Smart Bricks can learn, ship and scale.

Who We’re Looking For

We’re looking for a builder who can become an engineering leader — not an engineering manager who used to build.

You’ve taken products from zero to one, made foundational architecture decisions, written production code and hired exceptional engineers.

You move naturally between first‑principles technical thinking and pragmatic execution.

You’ll likely have:

• 7–15 years building AI infrastructure, distributed systems, enterprise software, developer platforms or similarly complex systems
• Led engineering through a high‑growth phase at an exceptional startup or scaleup
• Experience building or scaling an engineering team from single digits
• Shipped multiple products from zero to one, ideally used by real enterprise customers
• Deep hands‑on architecture experience across areas such as agentic systems, workflow platforms, knowledge systems, distributed systems, infrastructure products or developer tooling
• Exceptional software engineering fundamentals across systems design, data modeling, APIs, performance, reliability and security
• Real fluency with the modern AI stack: LLMs, retrieval, vector databases, agent orchestration, MCP, evaluation frameworks and cloud‑native infrastructure
• Experience setting an extremely high hiring and technical bar while remaining close enough to the code to debug production yourself
• Worked directly with product teams and customer‑facing organisations
• The ability to communicate complex technical decisions clearly to technical and non‑technical stakeholders

You’re equally comfortable writing production code, designing architecture, reviewing pull requests, debugging live systems, interviewing engineers and sitting with an enterprise customer to understand their hardest technical problem.

Experience in real estate isn’t required.

We care far more about exceptional engineers who enjoy solving difficult problems and building systems from first principles.

The Person Who Will Thrive Here

You probably won’t enjoy Smart Bricks if you’re looking for a mature engineering organisation with established processes, clearly defined boundaries and a roadmap handed to you.

You’ll thrive here if you want to:

• Build rather than inherit
• Operate with significant autonomy
• Work directly with the Founder
• Make consequential technical decisions
• Stay deeply technical while building a team
• Work directly with customers
• Recruit people better than yourself
• Build something that could define a category

We expect an unusually high level of ownership.

In return, you’ll have an unusually high level of influence.