Engineering Lead

Qabird; Delft; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 vacation days

Laptop provided

Flexible hours

Hybrid work (2 days wfh)

Travel reimbursement

Ownership in engineering

Job summary

Fiducial is seeking an Engineering Lead in Delft, Netherlands to guide a multidisciplinary software, hardware, and embedded team. You will shape the engineering organization for scalable delivery, partner with CTO/COO, and implement pragmatic Agile practices while maintaining speed and quality.

You will balance technical credibility with people leadership, drive capacity planning, and mentor engineers as the team grows in size and complexity.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing multidisciplinary engineering teams in a hardware–software environment.
• Experience scaling engineering practices in a startup or scale-up context.
• Coaching and developing engineers across experience levels.
• Strong communication across engineering, product, and operations.
• Strong technical background in software systems, embedded systems, and/or hardware–software integration.
• Working knowledge of Agile development, CI/CD, and modern engineering tooling.
• Comfortable in environments with regulatory, safety, or defence-related constraints.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a multidisciplinary team of software, hardware, and embedded engineers.
• Strengthen engineering structure with clear ownership and accountability.
• Plan capacity and staffing aligned with priorities and delivery commitments.
• Improve engineering processes for scalability across development and field operations.
• Oversee hardware–software integration and system-level performance.
• Collaborate with Product, Operations, and CTO to translate requirements into plans.
• Introduce pragmatic Agile practices, CI/CD, and quality controls for growth.
• Serve as escalation point for complex technical issues with engineers and operations.
• Act as Chief of Staff to CTO on planning, debt versus new features, and deployment needs.
• Conduct 1:1s and performance discussions to drive growth and ownership.

Skills

Team leadership

Hardware–software integration

Agile, CI/CD

Cross-functional collaboration

Coaching engineers

Strong communication

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Important: WE CANNOT PROVIDE VISA SPONSORSHIP

Details

Preferred starting date: ASAP

Weekly availability: full-time (40 hours/week)

Location: Aerospace Innovation Hub, Delft, the Netherlands

Reports to: COO

About the company

Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. Currently, we are developing software for advanced on-board UAV situational awareness in military applications. Using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute, our solutions are built for scalability. From there, we plan to develop a line-up of interconnected solutions to safeguard European safety.

Our team consists of engineers that are passionate about the technology and solutions they develop. The only time most of us are not thinking about the technology is when we are asleep, and sometimes even then. Our team members have a background in different fields such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics and Computer Graphics. Our office is located in the Aerospace Innovation Hub, a start-up hub located on the TU Delft campus in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering.

We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from government agencies and prime contractors to academic research institutes and other start-ups. Our projects span from large tender orders in collaboration with partners to low TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment.

Your role

As Engineering Lead, you will lead and grow Fiducial’s multidisciplinary engineering team across software and hardware domains. You will play a key role in strengthening and extending our engineering foundations, ensuring they remain robust, scalable, and aligned with the company’s growth trajectory.

Over the past months, Fiducial’s engineering organization has matured significantly, with clearer ownership, improved delivery rhythms, and increasing deployment experience. This role is not about reinventing what already works, but about professionalizing and scaling the existing foundations. A central part of your mandate will be ensuring that engineering processes, structures, and practices are designed to support scalability while enabling the team to grow in size, complexity, and deployment scope without losing speed or quality.

While Project roles focus on delivery execution within our ongoing technical projects , this role focuses on strengthening the people, structure, capacity planning, and engineering system that enable sustainable, predictable delivery at scale.

You will balance strong technical credibility with people leadership, organizational design, and process improvement. Acting as a close partner to the CTO and COO, you will help ensure engineering operates as a cohesive, high-performing system during a critical scale-up phase.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a multidisciplinary team of software, hardware, and embedded engineers, including mentoring junior engineers and interns.
• Strengthen and evolve the engineering organization structure, ensuring clear ownership, accountability, and healthy team dynamics.
• Ensure engineering capacity planning and project staffing align with company priorities and delivery commitments.
• Strengthen and evolve engineering processes to support scalability across development and field operations.
• Oversee strategic initiatives that elevate effective hardware–software integration and system-level performance across deployed solutions.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Operations, and CTO by translating product requirements into actionable engineering plans.
• Collaborate closely with DevOps and IT Infrastructure to Introduce and adapt pragmatic Agile practices, CI/CD pipelines, and quality controls appropriate to the company’s growth stage.
• Support deployed systems by acting as an escalation point for complex technical issues, in collaboration with relevant engineers and operations.
• Act as Chief of Staff to CTO by contributing on his behalf to planning and prioritization of engineering work, balancing technical debt, new features, and deployment needs.
• Conduct regular 1:1s and performance discussions, focusing on growth, ownership, and accountability.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and developing engineers as the team grows.

What We Expect From You

• You build trust with strong individual contributors and help them operate effectively as a team.
• You are comfortable operating in a early scale-up phase: introducing structure where needed without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
• You communicate clearly and transparently across engineering, product, and operations.
• You value field reality and user feedback as much as clean designs and architectures.
• You can move between strategic thinking and practical execution when required.
• You provide clear technical and organizational direction while remaining adaptable in a fast-moving environment.

Skills & Experience

• Proven experience managing multidisciplinary engineering team(s) in a hardware–software environment.
• Experience scaling engineering practices in a startup or scale-up context.
• Ability to coach and develop engineers across different experience levels.
• Strong communication skills and experience collaborating across functions.
• Strong technical background in software systems, embedded systems, and/or hardware–software integration.
• Working knowledge of Agile development, CI/CD, and modern engineering tooling.
• Comfortable working in environments with regulatory, safety, or defence-related constraints.

Collaboration & Scope

• Work closely with Head of Product & CTO to align engineering execution with product priorities.
• Work closely with Project Managers to improve deployment readiness and field support processes.
• Act as a trusted Chief of Staff, execution partner and advisor to the COO and CTO on engineering delivery and organizational topics.

Autonomy & Decision-Making

• High autonomy in managing day-to-day engineering execution and team operations.
• Authority to propose and implement improvements to engineering practices and workflows.
• Escalation of high-impact risks or trade-offs to leadership when alignment is required.

What we offer

• Money of course.
• 25 vacation days per year.
• Reimbursed travel expenses and company laptop.
• (Really) flexible working hours and option to work from home 2 days per week.
• Working with an highly motivated, international, world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs solving real-life problems with amazing technology.
• Significant ownership and influence over how engineering is done.
• The opportunity to build scalable systems and teams during a critical growth phase.