Head of Engineering

Company overview

Shinka is an AdTech company focused on programmatic monetisation for CTV and DOOH. Its platform connects advertisers and publishers, handles billions of ad requests every day, and is built to create measurable outcomes through technology and partnerships.

Role summary

This is the first Head of Engineering at Shinka and a key leadership hire reporting directly to the CEO. The role is designed for someone who can shape how engineering grows: building team structure, strengthening quality controls, and managing external vendors so the company can scale beyond a founder-led model.

A major part of the mandate is to create an AI-native engineering organisation, with agentic development, Claude Code, and AI-assisted workflows embedded into how the team builds, governs, and hires. You will partner with the fractional CTO, whose move into an advisory role depends on this hire being successful and the transition being smooth rather than tied to a fixed date.

The current engineering team is a capable five-person group that has already delivered well and earned the trust of the business. Your first priority is not to overhaul what is working, but to understand the existing systems and design the next stage of engineering scale.

The company is practical about onboarding time: an experienced manager may need around three months to become fully effective and around six months to deliver full structural impact; someone stepping into engineering leadership for the first time may take longer. Both backgrounds can work in this position.

Key responsibilities

• Design and evolve the engineering organisation, including hiring, performance management, and retention for direct reports and the wider team.
• Set and protect the hiring standard. The company looks for product-minded engineers who value autonomy, direct customer interaction, and ownership of results, as well as engineers who are comfortable using AI-native, agentic development practices. Every candidate should be assessed for how they think and build, not only for their technical knowledge.
• Oversee how engineering capacity is supplemented through external vendors as the company scales, including reviewing contracts, defining service levels, holding regular vendor reviews, and managing escalations.
• Put core engineering quality systems in place, including CI test gates, production alerting, and checks for business-data accuracy. Building these foundations is considered an early structural win for the role.
• Own engineering standards for code review, deployments, on-call coverage, and incident follow-up.
• Drive adoption of agentic engineering practices, including Claude Code and other AI-assisted workflows, while ensuring governance and quality controls remain in place before throughput increases.
• Hire and develop engineers who actively support AI-native ways of working.
• Translate product direction from the CEO into delivered work that ships on schedule and meets quality expectations.
• Provide weekly updates on organisational health, including team capacity, risk areas, and where additional support is required.

Candidate profile

The role is a fit for candidates at a career inflection point, including senior engineers or tech leads who have already been doing informal leadership work and are ready for a first formal management role, engineering managers who want broader scope, or experienced engineering leaders who prefer hands-on organisational building over top-down direction.

Experience and capabilities

• Comfort with people management topics such as performance conversations, retention, and difficult hiring decisions, or a genuine willingness to build these skills quickly.
• A strong point of view on engineering quality, including code review, testing, deployment practices, and incident response.
• Deep familiarity with AI-native workflows and a clear stance on governance; tools such as Claude Code should already be part of day-to-day work, and the candidate should be able to bring others along with them.
• Ability to run the team independently while the CEO travels frequently, making good calls, escalating appropriately, and keeping things moving without constant approval.
• Good judgment in assessing engineering talent, including the ability to distinguish between candidates who want to own customer outcomes and those who mainly want to close tickets, and to defend that standard when pressure exists to hire faster.
• Willingness to stay close to the code without measuring success by how many pull requests personally get merged.

Preferred background

• Experience in AdTech, programmatic, RTB, or a similarly complex enterprise SaaS environment is helpful but not mandatory.
• Background leading mixed EU and non-EU teams is advantageous.
• Experience scaling an engineering organisation through a major growth phase is valuable.
• Public writing or speaking on engineering management is a plus.
• A network of senior engineers you would be happy to bring into the business is beneficial.

Technology environment

The company values how you think more than the exact tools you have used. For context, the current platform includes a Go-based real-time bidding engine built on the open-source Prebid Server foundation with a Shinka-owned caching layer in the auction core. The web application uses TypeScript and React and is moving toward an agent-first configuration model. Infrastructure runs on multi-region Kubernetes in GKE, with GitOps deployment through ArgoCD on Google Cloud, supporting production programmatic traffic across CTV and DOOH.

On the data side, PostgreSQL and Redis sit on the serving path, while BigQuery and Kafka support analytics. Security and compliance are already established through SOC 2 Type I and Type II audits and independent penetration testing.

Working environment

This is a small team environment with real ownership, minimal approval layers, and quick decision-making rather than long waits for sign-off.

Compensation and benefits

The base salary range is €90,000 to €135,000 depending on experience. The package also includes equity with standard four-year vesting and a one-year cliff.

Location and working pattern

The role is based in Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland. It is a hybrid position with office attendance required three days per week and the option to work remotely two days per week.

How to apply

Applicants should send a short message to the hiring team with two points: the most difficult organisational change they have personally led, and a recent technical decision they made that turned out to be wrong along with what they would change now. The email subject should be “Head of Engineering - [your name]”. A cover letter and formal CV are not required at this stage.

Candidates whose background does not perfectly match every point are still encouraged to apply if the role feels like the next step they want to take.