Head of Engineering – Shinka
Starting at €120,000 + Equity | Dublin | Hybrid – 3 days onsite
Essential: Know our current stack, which includes Go, TypeScript, React, Kubernetes/GKE, ArgoCD, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery and Kafka. This is essential for your role, if you are not familiar with this and don't know how to use them, we don't recommend applying.
About Shinka
Shinka is an AdTech platform specialising in programmatic monetisation across CTV and DOOH. We connect advertisers with publishers, processing billions of ad requests every day.
The Role
We’re hiring our first Head of Engineering.
This is a hands-on leadership role. We’re looking for a player-coach — someone who can lead and grow the team, but who still loves being close to the technology and leads by example technically.
You won’t spend your days sitting above the engineering team managing spreadsheets and status updates.
You’ll be in the detail when it matters: helping make architecture and technical decisions, reviewing approaches, raising engineering standards, unblocking the team and occasionally getting your hands dirty in the code.
You’ll report directly to the CEO and work alongside our fractional CTO, who’ll move into an advisory role once you’re properly up and running.
You’ll inherit an established five-person engineering team that has shipped well and has the trust of the business. This isn’t about coming in and rebuilding everything. It’s about understanding what works, keeping the good bits and putting the structure in place to scale.
What You’ll Own
- Lead from the front: Be the technical leader in the team. Stay close to the code and architecture, challenge decisions constructively, unblock engineers and set the standard through how you work.
- The team: Hiring, performance, retention and shaping the engineering organisation as we grow.
- The hiring bar: Hire product engineers who like autonomy, customer contact and owning outcomes, and who are excited about AI-native development.
- Engineering quality: Own the standards around testing, CI, monitoring, code review, deployment, on-call and incident response.
- AI-native engineering: Make agentic development and tools like Claude Code a core part of how the team builds, with the right quality controls and governance around them.
- External capacity: Manage engineering vendors, contracts, SLAs and where external support makes sense.
- Delivery: Turn product direction into high-quality shipped work and keep a clear view of capacity, risk and where the team needs support.
Who Could Be a Great Fit
There isn’t one perfect background.
You could be a senior engineer or tech lead ready to step into formal leadership, an engineering manager looking for broader ownership, or an experienced engineering leader who wants to get closer to the technology again.
What matters is that:
- Essential: Know our current stack, which includes Go, TypeScript, React, Kubernetes/GKE, ArgoCD, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery and Kafka. This is essential for your role, if you are not familiar with this and don't know how to use them, we don't recommend applying.
- You’re a strong engineer first and foremost, with the technical credibility to lead other good engineers.
- You want to be a player-coach, not a manager who operates at arm’s length.
- You enjoy getting into technical problems, architecture and code when needed, while knowing when to step back and let the team own things.
- You have strong opinions on engineering quality, testing, deployment and incident response.
- You’re AI-native. Tools like Claude Code are already part of how you work, and you can bring a team along with you.
- You’re comfortable making decisions independently and keeping things moving.
- You have a good eye for engineering talent and value engineers who own outcomes rather than simply close tickets.
- You care about developing people and building a strong engineering culture.
Nice to Have
- AdTech, programmatic, RTB or complex enterprise SaaS experience.
- Experience with distributed EU/non-EU teams.
- Experience scaling an engineering organisation.
- A network of strong engineers you’d happily work with again.
- The Tech
We care more about how you think than whether you’ve worked with every technology we use.
The platform is SOC 2 Type I and Type II audited and independently penetration-tested.
The Package
Starting €120,000
Equity, with standard four-year vesting and a one-year cliff.
Location: Ideally Dublin-based and working hybrid with the team.
Pay: From €120,000.00 per year
Ability to commute/relocate:
- Dublin, County Dublin: reliably commute or plan to relocate before starting work (required)
Experience:
- Management: 4 years (required)
Work authorisation:
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Dublin, County Dublin
