Head of Engineering

About the role

Palo IT Labs is looking for a Head of Engineering to lead its AI engineering organisation. Reporting to the CTO, you will turn strategic AI‑first roadmaps into daily execution, ensuring high‑quality delivery for client‑facing and product teams.

Key responsibilities

• Own day‑to‑day engineering health: standards, roadmap execution, incident ownership and post‑mortems.
• Guide AI engineering community: architecture governance, token‑economics balancing cost, latency and quality, and AI‑first production standards.
• Mentor and manage Forward Deployed Engineers and AI tech leads, shaping career paths and performance.
• Drive cross‑project collaboration, reusable patterns, and community rituals such as critiques and learning circles.

Required profile

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with senior leadership of an engineering organisation (e.g., VP Engineering, Head of Tech).
• Proven track record delivering production‑grade AI‑first systems, LLM integration, RAG pipelines and agent orchestration.
• Strong people‑development skills, able to scale practices through mentorship and community building.
• Bilingual French/English, with English mandatory for client and international collaboration.

Required skills

• AI‑first development, LLM integration, Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
• Token‑economics optimisation (cost, latency, quality trade‑offs).
• CI/CD, code review, incident management and security best practices.
• Cloud architecture concepts (AWS, GCP, Azure) – nice to have certifications.