About the Role
The engineering organisation today is around 15 people, organised across three product squads (Core, Data Extraction, B2B and Cybersecurity & compliance), with an independent R&D department managing AI and R&D squads.
They have strong, experienced Tech Leads on every squad, people who are close to the code and own technical direction in their areas.
This role is not about technical contribution. It is about making the department a high-functioning organisation.
You will take the strategic and people weight off the individual leads, and create the conditions, structure, process, priorities, culture in which they and their teams consistently do their best work.
You will report directly to the CEO and work in close partnership with the Head of Product.
Your success will be measured by team health, delivery quality, strategic alignment, and Primetag’s ability to scale its engineering capability without losing speed or cohesion.
What You Will Own
1. People Leadership & Team Dynamics
This is the most important part of the job. An engineering team of this size, with strong individual contributors, needs an intentional leader — someone who builds trust, navigates interpersonal friction, and keeps the team pulling in one direction.
• Run real, substantive 1:1s with managers and team leads at a regular cadence, not status updates, but genuine coaching and development conversations
• Build a management layer where every engineer has a manager genuinely invested in their growth and wellbeing
• Actively manage team dynamics: address ego clashes and internal friction quickly and directly, before they become cultural problems
• Keep motivation high by making sure people understand what their contribution is working toward, why it matters, and where they stand
• Run formal performance cycles - reviews, calibrations, structured feedback and make the hard calls when performance and growth are not happening
2. Prioritisation & Work Organisation
They need sharper prioritisation discipline, not a theoretical framework on a slide, but an operating rhythm that people actually follow and that produces better outcomes. This means someone who has done this hands-on: built the system, enforced it, and kept it pragmatic.
• Own the engineering planning and prioritisation process end-to-end: from intake through sprint cadence through delivery
• Design a system that balances structured methodology with real-world pragmatism, one that uses good process as a tool, not as a substitute for judgment
• Translate company objectives into engineering OKRs and defend them when short-term urgency tries to displace them
• Create visibility across squads into what is being worked on, what is blocked, and what is at risk, so decisions get made at the right level, at the right time
• Improve the operating relationship between Engineering and Product, ensuring that planning is collaborative, and execution is predictable
3. Technical Leadership (Through Others)
You will not be the most technical person in the room on any given topic, and that is the right design. The Tech Leads own their domains. Your job is to create the strategic context in which their technical judgement produces good outcomes at the department level.
• Set the strategic context for technical decisions: what outcomes matter, what constraints apply, what trade-offs are acceptable
• Run architecture and design reviews that challenge assumptions and force clarity without second-guessing the leads on implementation
• Identify cross-cutting concerns (security, reliability, scalability, technical debt) and ensure they get the attention they deserve across squads
• Guide build vs. buy decisions, vendor selection, and infrastructure trade-offs with a clear commercial and risk lens
• Lead the ISO 27001 preparation on the engineering side, this is an important element of the roadmap and needs active ownership. Alignment with CEO and Head of Product
• You will be a key partner at the leadership level, not just an executor of strategic decisions made elsewhere. This requires proactive communication, reliable reporting, and the ability to represent engineering’s capacity and constraints honestly.
• Partner with the Head of Product in a genuinely collaborative planning relationship, not a handover model, but shared ownership of what gets built and when
• Report to the CEO on engineering budget, hiring plan, and strategic progress on a regular cadence, with clarity and without noise
• Bring engineering’s perspective into company-level decisions early, and take company-level priorities back into the department clearly
• Ensure that Engineering, Product, and Customer Experience share a common understanding of priorities, dependencies, and risks
5. Organisational Design & Hiring
The right structure for 15 engineers is not the right structure for 25. You will see these transitions coming and lead them deliberately
• Decide how the department is organised: which squads exist, where the boundaries sit, who reports to whom, and how management layers evolve
• Own the engineering hiring engine: define profiles, run loops, close senior candidates, and build a hiring rhythm that keeps pace with the growth plan
• Hire or develop the management layer below you — building a team of managers who are genuinely invested, not just technically credible
6. Process & Operational Rigour
• Own incident response, on-call, release processes, post-mortems, and code review standards
• Improve what works, replace what does not, and codify decisions so they survive turnover
• Ensure Customer Experience has a reliable engineering counterpart with clear processes for bug triage, incident resolution, and feedback loops
7. Engineering Budget
Currently, a seven-figure annual budget covering infrastructure, third-party data providers, tooling, and headcount-adjacent spend.
• Own trade-offs across headcount vs. tooling, build vs. buy, and cost reduction vs. capability investment
• Report regularly to the CEO with clarity and commercial rigour
What They are Looking For
Fundamental
• Track record of managing managers in an engineering organisation of 10–50 people , comfortable at the manager-of-managers level
• Has led teams through real prioritisation challenges: not someone who designs frameworks, but someone who has enforced discipline, navigated competing
stakeholders, and kept teams focused under pressure
• Strong on team dynamics: has actively managed interpersonal friction, navigated strong personalities, and kept engineers motivated through uncertainty and change
• Technical background, not hands-on: deep enough to engage credibly with architecture, design reviews, and trade-off decisions, not expected to code
• Has owned a real engineering budget: seven figures or more, with vendor negotiations, build-vs-buy trade-offs, and regular reporting to a CEO or Board
• Has built hiring engines, not just filled vacancies: defined profiles, run loops, closed senior hires, established hiring rhythm at speed
• Direct on performance and conflict: gives hard feedback, addresses underperforms early, and has conversations others avoid
• Strong communicator across technical and non-technical stakeholders, credible to engineers and to a CEO in the same conversation
• Excellent English understanding, speaking and writing skills. Portuguese or Spanish are an added value given the team's major nationalities, but not a compulsory criteria.
Strong Advantage
• Experience scaling an engineering organisation from 2 to 5+ teams
• Background in martech, adtech, social media analytics, or data-intensive SaaS
• Familiarity with compliance and security programmes (ISO 27001 experience a plus - it is on our 2026 roadmap)
• Experience working closely with a Head of Product in a joint planning model
Why Join Primetag
• Lead engineering at a company genuinely transforming how Creator Marketing operates globally
• Work directly with the founder and CEO , with real influence over company strategy, not just engineering execution
• Join during an expansion phase, with new products, new markets, and a team ready to grow
• A strong technical foundation already in place: experienced Tech Leads, clear domain ownership, and a team that cares about craft
• Full remote, with annual Nomad Offices in remarkable locations - their culture is built around trust, autonomy, and real collaboration.• A multicultural, ambitious team driven by product excellence and genuine impact
Want to know more about them? Check out:
Their Manifesto:
https://a.storyblok.com/f/302516/x/8f9ad3faea/primetag-manifesto.pdf
Their award-winning web series that reflects our culture and Nomad Office:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=locuy5C02Ww
