Location: Remote (Europe, with Central European timezone overlap)
Type: Full-time B2B contract, long-term (Employment / EOR available if preferred)
TL;DR
We are looking for a hands-on Head of Engineering to take our core distribution engine from a fast-moving, founder-built product to a dependable, high-throughput platform running at scale. Roughly 2/3rds of your time will be spent in the engine room - architecture, code, reliability, and AI workflows.
The rest will go into prioritisation, technical strategy, and building a high-output engineering team.
This role is ideal for an experienced Head of Engineering who still loves writing software, or a Staff Engineer / Tech Lead with exceptional taste and systems judgment ready to formally own an entire engineering function.
About Spektra
Organic distribution is broken for most companies. Spektra builds full-stack distribution engines, helping brands turn social media virality into a predictable, compounding channel for customer acquisition.
We combine deterministic software, media generation pipelines, browser automation, and frontier AI models into a platform that handles everything from content production to real-time analytics and distribution feedback loops.
The core engine is built, proven, and running in production. Now, the real scaling phase starts. We are keeping the team talent-dense, low-ego, and deliberately small - we’d rather have fewer exceptional people who take extreme ownership than build an unnecessarily large organisation.
What The Role Actually Is (and Isn't)
You will own the technology function end-to-end.
- It is a hands-on technical leadership role. You inherit a working production architecture built largely by our technical founder (former Klarna infra/reliability engineer and Fractional CTO). Your first job is not to burn it down and rewrite it; it is to establish dependability, scale our throughput, tame technical debt, and raise the engineering bar.
- It is a high-trust technical partnership. You will work directly with our founder, Chris. He spent years building developer tooling for 1,200+ engineers and reliability platforms across 200 teams at Klarna. You are not his implementation arm or a ticket-taker. You will own day-to-day execution, challenge trade-offs, and set the architecture. We don't view "business" and "tech" as separate conversations.
- It is not an ivory-tower management gig. If you want to spend your week running Jira ceremonies, steering committees, or drawing diagrams without touching code, this will frustrate you. Roughly 70% of your time will be spent with your hands on the wheel: writing code, reviewing PRs, debugging production issues, and stress-testing architectures.
- It is natively AI-driven. AI is not an experimental feature or a pitch deck buzzword for us. It runs through what the product does and how we build it. You lead by doing - embracing modern agentic workflows and AI-assisted development, helping internal engineers and contractors turn frontier models into dependable production software.
What You Will Own
- System Architecture & Coherence: Make pragmatic architecture decisions across our platform, ensuring systems hang together cleanly as throughput grows.
- High-Throughput Pipelines: Own the reliability and performance of data-intensive workflows: video generation, automated scheduling, browser-based data collection, and social publishing.
- Deterministic Software + AI: Build resilient pipelines where frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) interface predictably with deterministic code via structured outputs and rigorous fallbacks.
- Infrastructure & Observability: Own the uptime, security, latency, and cost of our stack without relying on a dedicated platform team.
- Engineering Craft & Standards: Set the bar for testing, CI/CD, and technical hygiene. You know when quick-and-dirty is acceptable and where redundancy is non-negotiable.
- Team & Execution: Turn ambiguous product goals into clean technical roadmaps. Manage and mentor a small group of contractors and future full-time engineers, hiring for talent density over headcount.
What We Think Matters
You are an exceptional engineer first, and a leader second. You know what good looks like, and it bothers you when things aren't built properly.
- Deep Production Experience: Years of building, shipping, and operating scalable web applications and distributed systems in high-paced startup or scale-up environments.
- Modern Backend & TypeScript Mastery: Deep fluency in TypeScript (Node/Bun) and robust backend fundamentals. Working knowledge of Python is important for our data and automation services.
- Distributed Workflows & Background Jobs: Real-world experience with schedulers, asynchronous task queues, and event-driven patterns - and the judgment to know whether a managed runner (like Trigger.dev) or dedicated infrastructure (Redis/BullMQ/Celery) is the right tool for the job.
- Frontier AI in Real Production: You’ve moved well past simple LLM wrapper demos. You know how to enforce schemas (e.g., Zod), handle model non-determinism, track costs, and evaluate outputs reliably.
- Scrappy Infrastructure Judgment: Deep comfort with Docker, GitHub Actions, cloud infrastructure, and observability. You run production systems pragmatically without waiting for a DevOps team to hand you an environment.
- Media / Automation Background (Bonus): Hands-on experience with video pipelines (ffmpeg, Remotion), social APIs, headless browser automation (Playwright), or large-scale web scraping is a major plus.
The Current Stack
We select tools that prioritize developer velocity and runtime performance:
- Application Core: TypeScript, React 19, React Router v7, Bun, Node workers.
- Data & Automation: Python (uv, FastAPI, Playwright) for scraping, automation, and GTM tooling.
- Media Processing: Remotion & Remotion Lambda on AWS, ffmpeg, HLS, Whisper, TwelveLabs.
- Data Layer: Postgres via Supabase, Typesense, AWS S3.
- Asynchronous Jobs: Trigger.dev today (you will decide if/when we migrate to Redis, Celery, or BullMQ).
- AI Infrastructure: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or Openrouter APIs with structured outputs, guarded by strict Zod contracts.
- Ops & Delivery: Docker, GitHub Actions, Coolify, Hetzner, Vercel, Terraform, Sentry.
This Is Probably Not For You If
- You consider yourself "engineering-adjacent" and prefer managing people over touching the code.
- You need fully baked requirements, long planning rituals, or corporate bureaucracy before shipping.
- Your AI experience is limited to personal scripts or prototyping with basic prompt templates.
- You optimize for team size rather than leverage, output, and business impact.
How We Hire
We respect your time. Our interview process is lean, transparent, and focused on real craft:
- Introductory Call (30 min): A relaxed conversation with our founder, Chris, to discuss mutual fit, your background, and Spektra’s direction.
- Deep-Dive Architecture Interview (60 min): We review a real-world system you’ve built, walk through our current architecture, and debate trade-offs together.
- Hands-On Working Session / Paid Trial: A focused, practical exercise (or short paid collaboration) designed around an actual problem we face. No leetcode puzzles - just building together to see how we communicate.
- Offer.
How to Apply
Apply with your LinkedIn profile or CV, along with your GitHub (if you have one).
In your application note, please tell us about one production system you personally designed and built:
- What did it do?
- What broke or became difficult as it scaled?
- What specific trade-offs did you make to resolve it?
Concrete details beat a long laundry list of buzzwords. We read and respond to every thoughtful application.