At Squirro, we build solutions that bring structure, clarity, and insight to messy real-world data — used daily by leading organizations like Standard Chartered, and the European Central Bank. We believe the next leap in enterprise AI comes from combining knowledge graphs with generative AI.
We're looking for a Head of Engineering to lead our engineering teams through this next phase of growth. You'll partner closely with our CTO to define, assess and drive the technical roadmap, while staying hands-on to set and raise the bar for quality and architecture. This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of technical depth, people leadership, and product impact — a pragmatic builder who can scale both systems and teams simultaneously.
What You'll Do
Lead and grow the engineering organisation
- Lead, mentor, and develop our engineering teams — currently spanning AI & Search, Platform Integrations, Knowledge Graph & GraphRAG, and Generative AI.
- Build a culture of technical excellence, quality, motivation, continuous learning, and psychological safety where engineers do their best work.
- Act as a strategic recruitment partner: identify hiring needs, drive the process, and onboard exceptional engineers who continue to raise the bar.
- Foster open communication, knowledge sharing, and professional growth across teams.
- Create an engineering culture of rhythm and committed progress
Own and evolve the technical roadmap
- Partner with the CTO to define and execute Squirro's technical strategy, ensuring engineering efforts are tightly aligned with business goals.
- Balance long-term architectural vision with immediate delivery priorities — making the right trade-offs for a fast-moving, customer-facing product.
- Champion best practices in software development, AI integration, and data architecture to maintain and innovate on our competitive edge.
Drive delivery and operational excellence
- Oversee planning, execution, and engineering work across engineering teams — ensuring projects meet quality standards and committed timelines.
- Implement and refine agile methodologies to increase team productivity and responsiveness.
- Establish engineering processes and metrics that track performance and surface areas for improvement.
- Conduct code reviews and architecture reviews to uphold and elevate the technical bar.
- Bring in automation where necessary to raise the bar in operational excellence
Bridge engineering with the wider business
- Work closely with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to ensure engineering initiatives translate into real customer value.
- Articulate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders — building trust and alignment across the organisation.
- Stay close to customers and use cases
Push the frontier
- Stay current with emerging technologies in AI, search, knowledge engineering, and distributed systems — bringing the right advances into our roadmap.
- Encourage experimentation and a culture where engineers have room to innovate and take calculated risks.
- Keep Squirro's platform evolving: from GraphRAG and agentic workflows to search and enterprise integrations.
What You Bring
- Proven experience leading and scaling engineering teams in a startup or fast-paced product environment — you know what great looks like and how to get there with a committed team.
- Strong technical background in backend systems, distributed architecture, and AI/ML — enough to earn respect from a senior engineering team and guide complex technical decisions.
- Experience with modern AI technologies: LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, search, and/or knowledge graphs. You don't need to be an expert in all, but you need genuine fluency in the space.
- A track record of setting and constantly delivering against ambitious technical roadmaps.
- Exceptional communication and facilitation skills — comfortable driving alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A pragmatic, solution-oriented mindset: you focus on outcomes, not just process, and know when to move fast and when to slow down.
- Comfort navigating ambiguity and managing competing priorities in a dynamic environment.
- Bonus: hands-on experience with semantic web technologies, enterprise search platforms, or workflow/BPM systems.
Why Join Us
- Impact: Your work won’t disappear into a pipeline — you’ll see it used daily by some of the world’s leading organizations.
- Growth: Work on cutting-edge problems in AI, search, and knowledge engineering, alongside experienced engineers who value curiosity and learning.
- Culture: Agile and startup-like, with quick decision-making and plenty of room to contribute ideas.
- Balance: We believe in continuous feedback, lifelong learning, and supporting personal growth.
About Squirro
Squirro is the enterprise AI platform built for regulated industries, streamlining enterprise search and automating complex, custom workflows. Secure, private, scalable, permissions-aware, and fully auditable, the platform ensures that every result is accurate and verifiable. Squirro powers agentic AI applications that are grounded in the organization’s unique enterprise ontology. Further information about AI-driven business insights can be found at: https://squirro.com/
Skills Required
- Proven experience leading and scaling engineering teams in a startup or fast-paced product environment
- Strong technical background in backend systems and distributed architecture
- Fluency with modern AI technologies (LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, generative AI) and AI integration
- Experience with knowledge graphs and enterprise search or related retrieval architectures
- Track record of defining and delivering against ambitious technical roadmaps
- Exceptional communication and stakeholder alignment/facilitation skills
- Hands-on technical leadership and ability to conduct code and architecture reviews
- Comfort navigating ambiguity, prioritising trade-offs, and driving outcomes
- Hands-on experience with semantic web technologies, enterprise search platforms, or workflow/BPM systems
What We Do
Squirro marries data from any source with your intent, and your context to intelligently augment decision-making - right when you need it! Every organization benefits from our scalable Insight Engine to unsilo, connect, and synthesize all data types and generate highly valuable information. All of this creates a seamless, and bespoke insights experience that helps everyone in the organization save time. Squirro works with global organizations, primarily in the Financial Services, Insurance, Telecommunications, and Manufacturing industries. Customers include Bank of England, Standard Chartered, ING, Deutsche Bundesbank, European Central Bank, Radicant, Candriam, Armacell, and Ninety-One among many others.
