Head of Software Engineering [Riyadh]

Partnering with a deep tech startup building next-generation AI infrastructure. Seeking a Head of Software Engineering to lead the development of a standalone orchestration platform, decouple software from hardware, and drive integrations. Requires 10+ years of software engineering experience, deep expertise in AI infrastructure, and strong programming skills in Python, C++, and systems languages.

• Lead the development of a standalone orchestration platform.
• Define and execute the strategy to decouple software from hardware environments.
• Build and scale a developer-focused platform and ecosystem.
• Drive integrations with OEMs, cloud providers, and infrastructure partners.
• Own platform adoption and commercialisation through partnerships.
• Stay hands-on where needed—maintaining technical credibility with engineering teams.
• Engage with customers and partners at both technical and executive levels.

• Minimum 10+ years in software engineering with at least 4 years leading teams of 5 or more engineers.
• Deep expertise in at least two of: AI infrastructure, MLOps, distributed systems, GPU-accelerated workloads, HPC, or runtime systems programming.
• Strong background in GPU scheduling, KV-cache management, or LLM serving optimisation.
• Hands-on experience deploying and optimising AI infrastructure at production scale, ideally with multiple inference engines, utilities, and training frameworks.
• Proven ability to ship production software through a full release cycle, not just a prototype.
• Strong fluency in Python, C++, and a systems language (Rust, Go, or modern C); comfort with JavaScript or TypeScript for tooling.
• Solid grounding in Linux internals, containers, GPU drivers, CUDA, and observability tooling.
• Nice to have: Direct experience with sovereign AI, on-premise LLM deployment, air-gapped systems, or AI in regulated industries (defence, energy, government, finance, healthcare).
• Nice to have: Open-source contributions in the AI infrastructure space.
• Nice to have: Prior experience as a founding engineer or senior engineer at a deep-tech startup that reached commercial GA.
• Nice to have: Experience with security primitives: hardware fingerprinting, license enforcement, software protection, code obfuscation.