Head of Engineering

About Tawk.to

Tawk.to is the world's leading business messaging platform, enabling millions of businesses to communicate and engage with their customers in real time. We are a globally distributed, bootstrapped company with a simple mission — to help businesses meet their customers where they are.

As part of our continuous growth, we are seeking a Head of Engineering to lead and scale our global engineering function. This role requires a strategic leader with a strong technical foundation and a proven ability to build and lead high-performing, distributed teams.

Role Overview

You will co-own the entire technical direction of tawk.to with the CTO and be the ultimate owner of engineering execution, reliability, and velocity. You will oversee all engineering teams — including web, mobile, backend, DevOps, QA, and infrastructure — while partnering closely with Product, Design, and Operations to deliver exceptional product experiences to millions of users worldwide. This is a deeply technical, hands-on leadership role: you will still dive into architecture discussions, review critical PRs, and be the incident commander during major incidents.

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategy & Technical Leadership

● Co-define and drive the engineering vision in partnership with the CTO, ensuring alignment with product and business strategy.

● Lead the evolution of platform architecture to support global scalability, performance, and reliability.

● Translate product goals into actionable engineering plans and measurable outcomes.

2. Team Leadership & Development

● Lead, mentor, and scale engineering teams across multiple time zones (Malaysia, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Latvia, and beyond).

● Build a culture of accountability, innovation, and collaboration within a remote-first environment.

● Set and monitor performance standards and career growth paths for engineering managers and leads.

● Ensure effective communication, alignment, and collaboration across distributed teams.

3. Engineering Excellence

● Hands-on partnership with the CTO on technical architecture, from backend systems to APIs, frontend, and mobile apps.

● Strategic use of AI inside engineering (developer productivity, code analysis, automated QA)

● Champion world-class Developer Experience (DX) by shaping tools, processes, documentation, and engineering workflows that enable fast, safe, and joyful development.

● Ensure reliability, uptime, and performance through proactive monitoring and optimization.

● Partner with DevOps to ensure scalability, cost efficiency, and operational resilience.

● Implement robust processes for development, CI/CD, testing, and deployment.

● Ensure security, compliance (SOC2, GDPR), and data-protection standards are exceeded.

4. Execution & Delivery

● Oversee delivery of product and infrastructure roadmaps, ensuring timely and high-quality releases.

● Drive continuous improvement in velocity, quality, and operational efficiency.

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration

● Partner with Product and Design to balance innovation with execution.

● Collaborate with Operations, HR, and Finance for resource planning, budgeting, and vendor management.

Qualifications & Experience

Education: Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.

Experience & Background:

● 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5+ years in engineering leadership roles.

● Proven experience leading distributed or global engineering teams.

● Proven experience managing high-traffic, customer-facing SaaS platforms. You understand the complexities of real-time systems (messaging, streaming, notifications).

Technical Expertise:

Our primary stack includes:

● Backend: Node.js / TypeScript, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Kafka + Google Pub/Sub, Redis

● Frontend: Vue.js (admin dashboards and internal tools)

● Infrastructure: GCP + AWS, Kubernetes, high-availability distributed systems

● Real-time layer: WebSockets at massive scale, low-latency event delivery

We value deep experience with any similar high-scale, real-time stack (e.g., Go, Elixir, Java, .NET) as long as you’ve successfully led large Node.js or JavaScript-heavy organizations before or can ramp extremely quickly.

Strong hands-on background in:

● Event-driven architectures and message queues at scale

● Horizontal scaling of document/no-SQL databases (MongoDB sharding, Elasticsearch clusters)

● Cost-optimized cloud operations

● Modern SRE practices, observability, and chaos engineering

Preferred Attributes:

Prior experience in SaaS, messaging, communications, or large-scale web applications.

Strong business acumen with an understanding of product-led growth models.

Passion for mentoring and developing technical leaders.

Ability to thrive in a transparent, results-driven culture.

What We Offer:

Leadership role with direct impact on a globally recognized product.

Competitive salary

Growth opportunities in a flat, high-trust organization.

Collaborative and transparent work culture with global exposure.