VP of Engineering

Role Overview The VP of Engineering is a senior leadership role reporting directly to the CEO. It carries full responsibility for engineering strategy, team development, and technical architecture across MineHub's engineering organisation. This is not a hands-off role. The right candidate is equally comfortable setting direction at the executive level and rolling up their sleeves to help the team work through a hard problem. MineHub has grown through acquisition and may continue to do so. The VP of Engineering will be part of a centralised leadership function while working with platform teams that may remain partially decentralised. A core near-term priority is the rationalisation and consolidation of two distinct platforms, identifying opportunities for shared services and reducing architectural risk inherited from earlier build phases. The VP of Engineering will work in close partnership with Product leadership, and will be a key member of MineHub’s leadership team. Reporting Line Reports directly to: CEO Direct reports: 3 Tech Leads (and, through them, approximately 10 engineers) Key Responsibilities 1. Engineering Strategy & Transformation Define and own the engineering strategy, transformation roadmap, and success metrics for the engineering function Establish a clear set of engineering performance indicators — cycle time, deployment frequency, incident rates, team health — and use them to drive decisions Build a culture of continuous improvement, technical accountability, and measurable delivery Develop and execute a strategy for moving MineHub’s engineering organisation from its current state to a model that is faster, more scalable, and lower risk 2. Platform Consolidation & Architecture Own the technical vision for consolidating MineHub’s two acquired platforms, identifying areas of overlap and defining a shared services architecture Assess inherited codebases, including systems built by engineers who are no longer with the company, and develop a clear picture of risk, debt, and remediation priorities Ensure MineHub’s systems are scalable, secure, and maintainable as the business grows Define and implement a migration and consolidation roadmap in collaboration with tech leads and the Product team 3. People Leadership & Team Development Lead and develop the engineering organisation, with direct management of three tech leads and stewardship of the broader team Actively coach and develop tech leads, building their capability and capacity as leaders, not just technical contributors Own engineering hiring, onboarding, and retention, ensuring the team has the skills and capacity to meet business objectives 4. Delivery & Execution Drive consistent, predictable engineering delivery across the organisation Own the engineering delivery process, including standards, and tooling Identify and remove blockers at both the organisational and technical level, with a bias to action rather than escalation Be willing to get hands-on when the situation requires it — this role is not a purely strategic seat 5. Product & Business Collaboration Work in close, day-to-day partnership with the Product leaders to align engineering capacity with product priorities Participate actively in product planning, providing technical feasibility input and ensuring the roadmap is grounded in engineering reality Act as the primary engineering voice in leadership conversations, translating technical context for the CEO and wider business 6. Acquisitions & Integration Support MineHub’s growth-through-acquisition strategy by leading the technical evaluation and integration of acquired teams and platforms Develop repeatable frameworks for assessing, onboarding, and consolidating acquired engineering assets Manage the cultural integration of acquired engineering teams, balancing the need for centralisation with sensitivity to team identity and continuity 7. AI Engineering Strategy MineHub’s engineering team already uses AI for code review and code generation. The VP of Engineering will be expected to build on this foundation and move the organisation from ad-hoc individual adoption to a deliberate, systematic AI engineering strategy. Define MineHub’s AI engineering strategy: tooling standards, governance, and the roadmap for AI adoption across the full software development lifecycle Establish productivity benchmarks and measure the impact of AI tooling on delivery speed, quality, and team capacity Stay ahead of the curve on AI developments relevant to engineering, and ensure MineHub is positioned to benefit from them Champion AI adoption as a competitive advantage — this is a company that wants to move fast and the VP of Engineering should be a genuine believer, not a reluctant adopter What We Are Looking For Essential Proven experience leading engineering teams as a VP of Engineering, Head of Engineering, or Engineering Director, or a strong track record that demonstrates clear readiness for this step Experience with acquired teams or platforms — understanding the technical, cultural, and architectural challenges that come with integration and consolidation Demonstrable experience with legacy systems: the ability to assess, document, triage, and remediate codebases that are poorly understood or architecturally fragile A track record of engineering transformation — someone who has taken an engineering org from a difficult state to a measurably better one, with the data to show it Hands-on instinct: comfortable getting into the technical detail where the situation requires it Strong collaboration and alignment skills, particularly in working with product leadership A genuine, balanced view of AI in engineering — someone who is ahead of the curve or actively seeking to be, and who has clear ideas about how to embed AI systematically into an engineering organisation Sound technical judgment — able to assess architectural and engineering decisions critically, identify where previous decisions need to be revisited, and course-correct with confidence and without causing unnecessary disruption Strong communicator, able to operate effectively with a CEO and make engineering legible to a non-technical leadership team Nice to Have Experience in B2B SaaS, supply chain, commodities, or adjacent industries Familiarity with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure) Previous experience in a scale-up or growth-through-acquisition environment CTO-track ambition or prior CTO experience Hands-on familiarity with AWS, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or Django Experience guiding a team through a monolith-to-microservices or monolith-to-hybrid migration Technical Environment The current MineHub stack spans AWS (cloud infrastructure), JavaScript and TypeScript (frontend and services), Python and Django (backend), and a monolithic architecture that the team is actively working to evolve towards a hybrid model with selected microservices. Candidates do not need to be hands-on across all of these, but they should be comfortable making sound architectural decisions in this context and credible when working alongside engineers who live in this stack day to day. A key near-term challenge is managing the monolith-to-hybrid transition carefully — decomposing selectively and pragmatically, without disrupting delivery or introducing risk ahead of the team’s capacity to absorb it. Location Our search is focused on candidates based in Portugal where some of our engineering team are based, and we support a hybrid working model with mostly remote work. This role will form part of MineHub’s centralised leadership layer. What Good Looks Like at 12 Months The following outcomes represent a strong first year in this role: Architecture clarity — A documented, agreed consolidation roadmap for MineHub’s two platforms, with shared services identified and early implementation underway. The inherited technical risk is understood and ring-fenced with a clear remediation plan. Delivery predictability — A measurable improvement in deployment frequency and reliability. The team is no longer afraid to make changes, and delivery is faster and more consistent than at the start. Engineering ownership — The VP of Engineering has fully absorbed the engineering leadership responsibilities previously held by Product leadership on both platforms, freeing the Head of Product to focus entirely on product. The transition has been smooth and the relationship remains strong. Team health and structure — The right org structure is in place, tech leads are being actively developed, any critical hiring gaps have been addressed, and team retention is stable. AI engineering strategy — The organisation has moved from ad-hoc individual AI use to a coherent, org-wide AI engineering strategy. Tooling standards, governance, and productivity benchmarks are in place, and AI is embedded across the software development lifecycle in a deliberate, measurable way. Metrics culture — A baseline set of engineering metrics is in place and actively used to drive decisions. The engineering function can demonstrate its health and progress in clear, quantifiable terms.