Head of Engineering

About Kinly

Kinly's mission is to help older people live independently for longer. We help older people across the UK access the support that improves their healthspan, covering financial support, legal services, equipment, and care guidance, all delivered on a hyper-personalised basis. We combine technology with genuine human support to make a confusing, complex landscape simple, for people who are too often left behind by digital-first services. Our engineering team builds the AI-powered platform that makes this possible, alongside a growing data and integrations layer.

Why this role exists

Our tech team has grown to around 15 people, and we have strong delivery discipline already in place, led by our Delivery Lead. What's missing is a dedicated leader who owns the day-to-day of the team and the technical platform, freeing our CTO to focus on longer-horizon vision and strategy.

The three-way split looks like this:

• CTO — vision, long-term technical horizon, external/board-facing
• Head of Engineering (this role) — day-to-day people leadership and eyes-on technical governance
• Delivery Lead — sprint delivery, process, execution rhythm

This is a genuine leadership role, not a coding role — but you'll need to hold your own in technical discussions, earn the respect of a team of strong engineers, and be willing to go deep when it matters.

What you'll do

Leadership & people

• Be the day-to-day leader for our engineering team — motivation, culture, and direction
• Own career development, mentorship, and performance for engineers and tech leads
• Lead hiring for the engineering function as we grow
• Partner closely with our Delivery Lead, who owns sprint delivery and process — you own the people and the platform they're delivering on

Technical governance

• Set and maintain architectural standards and technical direction across the platform
• Own decisions on technical debt, scalability, and future-proofing our stack
• Provide oversight on major technical decisions without necessarily writing the code yourself
• Be a credible technical voice the team trusts — able to deep-dive on a specific problem when it counts

Strategic

• Work directly with the CTO to translate business priorities into engineering strategy
• Represent engineering in leadership discussions and planning

What we're looking for

• Experience leading or significantly influencing an engineering team's people and culture — this could be as an existing Head of Engineering, Engineering Manager, or a strong Staff/Principal Engineer ready to step up into a first leadership role of this scope
• Strong technical background — you've been a senior engineer or architect before moving into (or toward) leadership, and can still engage credibly on system design, trade-offs, and code-level detail when needed
• Track record of growing engineers and building a healthy team culture, not just managing output
• Comfortable operating with a fair amount of ambiguity and owning outcomes rather than just tasks
• Experience with modern web stacks (React, Python/FastAPI or equivalent). You don't need to be hands-on daily, but you need to understand what you're governing
• Experience with infrastructure, CI/CD, and cloud platforms. We use Azure, but AWS or GCP experience is equally relevant
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI, including LLM APIs, prompt engineering, and RAG
• Experience building an AI-native development process for writing and reviewing code
• Right to work in the UK (we're unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role)

Nice to have

• Experience in a startup or scale-up environment
• Background in a regulated, compliance-sensitive, or mission-driven sector
• Experience introducing or improving technical governance/architecture practices from scratch

Compensation

• £120,000–£150,000 base, depending on experience
• EMI share options, structured relative to salary

What Kinly offers

• The chance to shape both the team and the technical direction of a company doing genuinely meaningful work
• Direct partnership with the CTO — this is a role with real influence, not just execution
• EMI share options and a base salary aligned with market rates for the scope of the role