Head of Engineering

We are looking for a passionate and experienced Head of Engineering to join our third-stage rocket ship!

You will own engineering operations end to end, from people leadership and performance to compliance and cost discipline. You will empower Engineering Managers, create clarity across teams, and build the conditions for consistent high performance teams.

Based in our headquarters in Brussels, you will directly lead 5 Engineering Managers and shape the best work environment for 45 engineers. Reports to the CTO.

Location: Brussels, on a hybrid basis.

Key Responsibilities

1. People Leadership

You will be accountable for the performance, development, and wellbeing in the workplace of our engineers through its Engineering Managers.

• Directly manage and coach 5 Engineering Managers.

• Establish clear standards for leadership, execution, and accountability across teams

• Collaborate closely with HR and own hiring processes, performance management cycles, and organizational design

• Monitor team health, retention, engagement, and delivery predictability

• Act as escalation point for cross-team operational and interpersonal issues

• Create an environment where managers and engineers can consistently do their best work

2. AI Enablement & Operational Innovation

In coordination with the CTO, you will proactively contribute to identify opportunities where AI can improve workflows, remove friction, and increase leverage across teams. Making you the primary executor of this strategy.

• Listen closely to developers to identify adoption barriers, and opportunities around AI tooling, translate these field insights to actionable ones.

• Execute on AI adoption initiatives as discussed with the CTO.

• Ensure AI tool rollouts follow established security and compliance guardrails.

• Surface ideas for process improvements enabled by AI.

• Actively propose operational use cases that increase team efficiency.

3. Security & Compliance (ISO 27001)

You will act as the Security Officer for the organizational, people, and physical dimensions of ISO 27001. You will collaborate with the CTO, who has ownership of technical security controls, and potentially with external consultants who can be available to support.

• Own and maintain the operational side of the Information Security Management System.

• Drive audit readiness and coordinate internal and external audits.

• Manage organizational controls: policies, access reviews, risk registers, and supplier assessments.

• Ensure people controls: security awareness training, HR security processes, onboarding/offboarding security.

• Coordinate incident response processes and post-mortems.

• Maintain disaster recovery and business continuity documentation and practices.

4. Cost & Tooling Governance

• Own visibility and monitoring of engineering costs across cloud, infrastructure, and tooling.

• Establish cost accountability practices and identify optimization opportunities.

• Rationalize and standardize developer tooling to reduce sprawl and overhead.

• Support vendor negotiations in collaboration with Finance.

5. Process & Operational Excellence

• Continuously improve development and delivery processes to remove friction and bottlenecks.

• Standardize onboarding, offboarding, and access workflows.

• Ensure our operational structures evolve with the company growth.

• Bring discipline and predictability to how engineering operates daily.