Head of Engineering, Birda
Tech Leadership with Purpose
£90-100k
This role comes with a very generous stock options grant, ensuring you share in Birda’s success as we grow.
More information about location
Birdwatching app
Be an early applicant
Birdwatching app
1-20 employees
Be an early applicant
£90-100k
This role comes with a very generous stock options grant, ensuring you share in Birda’s success as we grow.
More information about location
1-20 employees
Company mission
To empower as many people as possible to enjoy the natural world, so they are inspired to fight to protect it.
Role
Who you are
- Proven leadership in startup environments, managing teams that build and maintain mobile apps—ideally with React Native
- Passion for the outdoors, birdwatching, or community-driven apps
- 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years of team leadership with a track record of growing high-performing, lean teams
- Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar) and backend systems
- Demonstrated success shipping and maintaining high-quality consumer products at scale
- Process-oriented mindset with the ability to balance rapid iteration and long-term stability through effective best practices
- Strong technical opinions shaped by experience, yet open to new evidence and flexible in approach
- Hands-on and pragmatic—comfortable rolling up your sleeves and contributing directly to the codebase
What the job involves
- Define and own Birda’s long-term engineering vision and roadmap, making key decisions on architecture, tooling, and infrastructure to ensure scalability and performance
- Balance speed, quality, and maintainability—making pragmatic trade-offs to support rapid product development without compromising long-term stability
- Foster a high-trust, outcome-driven culture that values experimentation, data-driven decisions, and learning from failure
- Hire, coach, and develop a lean, high-impact engineering team with a strong sense of ownership and collaboration
- Establish best-in-class engineering processes that support fast iteration while ensuring reliability and code quality
- Champion a culture of strong opinions, weakly held—encouraging confident decision-making that adapts in response to new evidence
- Work closely with Product, Design, and Leadership to align engineering efforts with company goals and deliver high-impact features
- Own platform performance, scalability, and security, using data and analytics and AI to continuously refine and optimise our technology stack
Application process
- Step 1 - Say hi to Birda: Approx. 1 hr video call with Lee or CPO
- Step 2 - Short follow-up call with Co-founder John & Natalie
- Step 3 - 1 hour call with our Tech Lead to execute a short challenge
Our take
Birda's app lets users keep a record of what they saw during their birding session. Users can then share this information easily with fellow birders in their network and beyond.
Birda is tailored to any kind of user, from casual nature-lovers, which are granted an easy way to access and learn about birding, to serious birders, which are provided with all taxonomies together in one place, making it easier to keep track of their observations.
Besides learning about the fascinating world of birds, Birda users can effectively help protect biodiversity, by simply sharing a birds location on the platform, customers can help conservationists to obtain the vital data they need to preserve thousands of bird species.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Mar 2025
$2.8m
Seed
Jun 2023
$2.8m
Seed
Total funding: $8.6m
Company benefits
- Remote & In-Person Balance: We mostly all work remotely as we are spread all over the UK/Europe and chat over Slack and Google Meet. We currently divide our time up into 'doing' and 'collaborating'. Doing can be done wherever you choose within the 1/+1 CET time zone, but collaborating is done in person, somewhere quiet with whiteboards and coffee. Right now that's a day or 2 every 6 weeks in London.
- Stock Options: Generous stock options grant, ensuring you share in Birda’s success as we grow.
- Co-Working Space: We want to support effective remote work for everyone and we understand that sometimes a change of scenery is helpful. You can work from a co-working space when you choose and we'll cover the cost.
- Awesome Perks: Enjoy 25 vacation days plus bank holidays and a bonus day for your birthday. Everyone gets a laptop that suits their role and you’ll receive some amazing Birda swag to show off your pride in our mission.
- Flexible Working: We understand the importance of work-life balance—whether it’s making the school run or working during your most productive hours.
Company values
- Your life is too precious to spend it making something that doesn't matter. Many of the greatest challenges that all humans will face both now and in the future will involve managing climate change. Encouraging an appreciation of the natural world is a small but vital part of rising to these challenges. We believe that getting people excited about the plants and animals that inhabit our planet will lead to people making different decisions about how they lead their lives
- Of course, you can't pay your rent / mortgage / deliveroo habit on good feelings so we'll be paying a respectable salary. We won't be able to compete with banks or large tech companies though, so our mission will need to matter to you
- We have an employee-friendly (gradual vesting, long exercise period) stock options grant. If you stick with us, you'll share in any success we achieve. It's still very early days for us which means that the amount of equity on offer will be meaningful - it's your baby too
Company HQ
Holborn, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
John White
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Business Analyst at The Coca-Cola Company, Co-Founder of Food Glorious Food, Associate, Vice President at Deutsche Bank, Co-Founder of Tracking the Wild and Consultant at Stratecon Consulting.
Lee Clissett
(CPO)Product leader with more than 15 years of experience in a mix of high-growth B2C and B2B products.
Natalie White
(Co-Founder & CDO)A purpose-driven co-founder of Birda, combining a background in Law and Strategy with a deep passion for nature and community-building.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Birda
- At Birda, we believe birdwatching is for everyone—no matter your gender, race, religion, or background.
- Our diverse team spans 5 nationalities and speaks multiple languages—we thrive on different perspectives.
- We’re committed to fostering an inclusive, welcoming community and workplace where everyone can belong and contribute.
- As an equal opportunity employer, we value varied life experiences and encourage applications even if you don’t meet 100% of the listed criteria. So if you just have a good feeling that you’d love this role, please don’t hesitate to apply.
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