Head of Product Engineering

We care less about ticking every box and more about your curiosity, learning speed, and potential to grow. If your path isn’t an obvious match on paper, tell us why you can grow into the role. We know that perfect candidates don’t exist. Even if not all of this applies to you, we’d love to learn more about you.

Experience

• 6+ years building and shipping products in production, ideally in startups or scale-ups where tech served the business.

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers: tech lead, lead dev, or de facto owner of a product area.

• A track record of owning features from problem to impact: you can tell us what you built, why, and what it changed for users or revenue.

• Full-stack TypeScript, with real backend depth and third-party API integrations in complex domains (telecom, payments, infra-heavy environments).

• You've handled production incidents and know what "good enough" looks like at an early stage.

Skills

• Sharp business sense: you quickly get what really matters for Kolet, ask the right questions, and push back on the need when it makes sense.

• Crystal-clear communication: code is a language, and so is talking to Ops, Growth or a partner. You understand precisely what's being asked and explain trade-offs simply.

• AI-native: AI coding tools are part of how you build, design UI and test. Every single day.

• Solid technical foundations: Node.js architecture, PostgreSQL, secure systems (OAuth, JWT lifecycle, secret management), GCP / CI/CD / containers, async and event-driven workflows.

• Product & UX sense: you can ship a clean interface from a design system without waiting for a pixel-perfect mockup.

• Comfortable mentoring engineers and giving structured, constructive feedback.

  ⭐️ *Bonus / Nice-to-have*

  • Experience with NestJS, ReactNative or Next.js.
  • Exposure to telecom, payments, or integration-heavy domains.
  • Already built and maintained a React Native app used by thousands of users.
  • You've already worked as a Product Engineer (or the closest thing to it).

Personality

• You measure success in impact shipped, not tickets closed or how pretty the code looks. For you, code that doesn't serve the business isn't beautiful code.

• You get genuinely hooked on problems: the kind you keep thinking about in the shower, because you understand what's at stake for the business and for our travelers.

• You love s*hipping fast without breaking things*, and you enjoy growing engineers as much as writing code.

• You have a healthy distrust of complexity; whether in code or in org design; you'd rather ship a simple, boring solution than an elegant one nobody can maintain

• You thrive in an early-stage startup where pace, pragmatism, and impact matter, and you’re energized by being the operational engine that turns the founding team’s vision into a product that works, day after day.

Languages:

• Fluent in English / French is a plus.