Head of Engineering

London (Hybrid) | Full-time | Competitive salary + early-team equity

The role

We're a well-funded startup building AI for architecture, engineering and construction: an archaic industry at a critical juncture. The Building Safety Act now requires firms to evidence their design decisions, and directors carry personal liability. We're building the system of record for that.

You'll run engineering at Bite, reporting to and working alongside El-Amin, our CTO and a former practising structural engineer. The foundations are in production and the platform is polyglot by design: a Node/TypeScript backend API, a React frontend, a C#/WPF Windows desktop connector and Python ML/RAG workers on Azure. You don't need experience in construction or in our exact stack. We hire for engineering judgement, and the team are polyglots who treat specific technologies as tools for tackling problems.

Why join Bite

The problem is genuinely hard. When a structural engineer changes Column C7 in their analysis model, the same column exists in drawings, schedules, specs and emails under different names, in different formats, some of which LLMs don't understand, and with no shared identifier. Resolving those references into one canonical entity, and predicting what just went out of date, is the core of our product, and the architecture that gets us there is yours to set.

You'll own engineering outright, not a slice of it. There's no engineering organisation to inherit and no layer of management to negotiate with. What exists today is a working platform and a small team; the standards, the architecture, the hiring bar and the shape of the function as it grows are all genuinely open, and they're your decisions to make.

Your work ships to people who pay. The beta is in production with signed customers that include some of the UK's leading structural engineering firms. Work goes from a customer conversation into the hands of working engineers within days, and you'll hear directly what landed and what didn't.

What we're building

Structural engineers work across a fragmented set of tools with no shared source of truth: ETABS models, SAFE analyses, Autodesk drawings, Excel specs, PDFs, emails. When a design changes, propagating that change across files is manual, slow and error-prone, and the errors are expensive.

Bite is the change management and audit trail layer for structural engineering. The platform does three things that today take weeks of manual work: natural-language search across a project's entire file ecosystem, cross-file impact detection, and propagation of those changes to every affected file under the engineer's supervision. All three run on a single engineering knowledge graph built on content-addressed file storage, per-file structured extraction, and a canonical entity resolver that unifies concepts across file formats.

What you'll do

• Own the technical direction of the platform: the knowledge graph, the entity-resolution layer, and the architecture everything else depends on.

• Hire and grow the engineering team, and set the bar that every subsequent hire is measured against.

• Establish how engineering operates as it scales: standards, code review, release, on-call, and how work gets prioritised.

• Stay hands-on where it counts, writing and reviewing code, with the credibility that earns in front of the engineers you hire.

• Work with El-Amin on how engineers reason about a column, a load path or a revision, and encode that into the data model.

• Set the roadmap alongside the founders and head of product, and own delivery against it.

What we need from you

• 10+ years in engineering, including a track record of shipping and owning production systems.

• Experience hiring, growing and leading a small engineering team, and evidence of the engineers you've developed.

• Strong backend depth, ideally Node.js or TypeScript in production, and comfortable reading C# and Python.

• Experience owning architecture for distributed, event-driven systems: APIs, queues, workers, storage.

• Still hands-on. You'll write and review code, and you'd be unhappy in a role where you didn't.

• Genuine product sense. We have no product managers between engineers and customers, and we don't plan to.

• Clear communication across deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations. We value clarity above speed.

• Kindness, curiosity, optimism and drive. We believe in being kind over being nice, and we give and receive constructive feedback constantly.

What will make you stand out

• Building an engineering function from a handful of people into a team, and the scar tissue that comes with it.

• LLM/RAG pipelines in production: embeddings, vector search, retrieval quality measurement.

• Graph-based data models, entity resolution, or knowledge graph tooling.

• Autodesk Platform Services or AEC data formats: IFC, Revit, ETABS, SAFE or similar.

• Background in construction, structural engineering software, or document-intensive vertical SaaS.

Don't rule yourself out over the stack. We're looking for strong engineers with sound principles. Technologies are tools.

What you can expect from us

• Early-team equity, with the numbers on the table at the first conversation.

• An engineering function to build, and the authority that comes with owning it.

• Technical direction that's genuinely open. The foundations exist; the decisions ahead are yours.

• Headcount to hire against, and the final say on who joins your team.

• Direct access to customers. You'll be on calls with structural engineers, not reading a summary of them.

• Founders who want to be argued with, and nobody standing between you and shipping.

• Hybrid working from our London office.

• A vertical you'll learn deeply: how structural engineering firms work, how AEC data formats behave, and how LLM/RAG systems hold up in production.

How we work

We believe in thorough automated testing. Not strict TDD, but every PR ships with the appropriate E2E tests, unit tests or eval harnesses. We own the entire platform including its deployment and reliability, so we control our own CI and CD. The team is autonomous, multi-disciplinary and empowered. Where you'd change any of that is your call to make.

Inclusion at Bite

Bite Engineering is an Equal Employment Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other legally protected status. We want people from all walks of life to feel valued for their individuality, thrive in our business and share a sense of belonging. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, let us know.