Lead Software Engineer, Bite Engineering

• Love learning a new domain, and shipping something within weeks that actually fixes what was broken in it
• 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, because that's how you earn credibility with 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
• Work closely with our Head of Product to build and execute a strong product roadmap, translating design-partner feedback into shipped features, and own engineering delivery against it
• Ship fast without breaking trust, moving quickly on new capability while protecting the reliability of a product design partners already depend on day to day
• Bring a track record of shipping and owning production systems end to end; years matter less to us than evidence you've done it
• Bring experience hiring, growing and leading a small engineering team, with evidence of the engineers you've developed
• Have strong backend depth, ideally Node.js or TypeScript in production, and are comfortable reading C# and Python
• Have experience owning architecture for distributed, event-driven systems: APIs, queues, workers, storage
• Are outcome-focused and hands-on, with a deep understanding of what's being built and comfort in the code, even when you're not hand-writing every line yourself
• Have genuine product sense: there's no layer of product management between engineering and customers, and you'll be on the calls directly
• Communicate clearly across deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations: clarity is what lets a small team move fast without customers losing trust in what's shipped
• Are kind, curious, optimistic and driven. We believe in being kind over being nice, and we give and receive constructive feedback constantly
• Don't rule yourself out over the stack. We're looking for strong engineers with sound principles. Technologies are tools

Desirable

• You'll run engineering at Bite, reporting to and working alongside El-Amin, our CTO and a former practising structural engineer. You and El-Amin will shape technical direction together: he brings deep domain expertise on how engineers reason about a column, a load path or a revision, but the platform's architecture, and how it gets built and shipped, are yours to own. 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
• 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. Our product 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. If you'd rather take a call with a structural engineer at 9am and ship them a fix by 5pm than sit in a product spec review, this is that job
• 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, because that's how you earn credibility with 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
• Work closely with our Head of Product to build and execute a strong product roadmap, translating design-partner feedback into shipped features, and own engineering delivery against it