Valis
Head of Engineering
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Portugal
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Not specified
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- - 10+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years as CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or Principal/Staff Engineer at a product company or a strong startup.
- - A track record of building systems from zero to production with real users and real load. You must have built them yourself, not only led the teams that did.
- - Deep hands-on experience running LLMs in production: agents, RAG, tool use and MCP, evals, and cost control. We are looking for real deployments, not pilots.
- - Strong backend architecture and data engineering: distributed systems, integrations, data stores, security and access control.
- - Experience managing an engineering team, including hiring and firing.
- - The ability to explain a technical decision to a client's non-technical executives and win their support for it.
- - Fluent English.
Nice to have
- - Good working knowledge of RU language
- - Experience in B2B SaaS, enterprise deployments, or forward-deployed engineering
- - Experience with company data: HRIS, ERP, finance, organisational structure.
- - A strong personal AI productivity setup.
Full description
About us
We are Valis - a company building an institutional AI operating layer for mid-market companies: shared company memory, workflow mining and agentic automation.
Why this role exists
We are hiring a CTO-level engineering leader. We need a strong person, able to own a major part of the technology from architecture through production, build their own team, and speak with clients at C-suite level.
What you will do
Platform architecture and engineering
- Own the architecture of the org brain and personal brain: data ingestion, knowledge storage, retrieval, agents, and integrations with Claude and other LLMs.
- Write code yourself where it matters most. This is a hands-on role, not only a management one.
- Design access control so each user sees only data from their own area. You will also own data retention and deletion, GDPR compliance, and multi-tenancy.
- Build MCP servers and connectors to company systems (Slack, Google Workspace, Asana, HRIS, DWH, ERP), and bring them to the point where clients can use them self-service.
Deployments
- Lead complex technical conversations
- Own the technical side of deployments
- Turn what works for one client into a product, so the same custom work is not repeated.
- Be the final technical escalation point for your area.
Infrastructure, data and cost
- Cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Cloudflare), CI/CD, observability and security.
- The data stack: data warehouse (Redshift, MotherDuck/DuckDB), ETL, and large-scale migrations.
- Platform costs: token and inference spend, subscriptions, and vendor negotiations.
Team
- Hire people, develop them, and let them go when needed. Hire people stronger than yourself.
- Build an engineering culture where the team owns outcomes and needs little day-to-day management.
- Use AI agents such as Claude Code as your main working tool, and make them the team's main tool too, not an experiment.
RequirementsMust have
- 10+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years as CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or Principal/Staff Engineer at a product company or a strong startup.
- A track record of building systems from zero to production with real users and real load. You must have built them yourself, not only led the teams that did.
- Deep hands-on experience running LLMs in production: agents, RAG, tool use and MCP, evals, and cost control. We are looking for real deployments, not pilots.