Head of Technology (Engineering, Platform & Living Systems)

Company and product

Role overview

Platform and engineering leadership

• Own the platform architecture, including device integration through Home Assistant, KNX, Zigbee, Matter/Thread and vendor ecosystems, plus MQTT, data lake, perception backend, and agentic layer.
• Make the platform reusable across workplace and residential products, with hospitality as a possible later use.
• Define local-first versus cloud operations, reserving heavier reasoning for frontier models while respecting personal data and UAE regulations.
• Lead build-versus-buy decisions and partner integration; hire and lead multidisciplinary engineering teams.
• Set code review, CI/CD, environment, documentation, and sprint standards; translate product roadmaps into technical plans, timelines, and staffing.

Hardware, reliability, and research

• Own physical technology integration, including lighting, sensors, switches, smart mirrors, speakers, cameras, wearables, and future robotics.
• Set up and operate lab and Experience Centre spaces with real hardware for software development; lead hardware RFPs and vendor selection with procurement.
• Build digital-twin simulators to enable testing before physical spaces are available.
• Own uptime and quality through automated monitoring, telemetry, alerting, and self-healing; establish functional, regression, stress, and chaos testing.
• Design for privacy, consent, and per-person household data separation; ensure manual operation and safe defaults during Wi-Fi, cloud, or AI outages.
• Define AI safety guardrails and kill-switch design; oversee R&D in wellness, longevity, robotics, and sensing, and maintain a technology radar.

Technical and leadership requirements

• Experience with distributed/event-driven systems, edge-and-cloud design, data platforms, APIs, and integrations.
• Practical experience shipping LLM-based or agentic systems, including RAG, tool use, local model deployment, evaluation, and guardrails.
• IoT and smart-building experience with Home Assistant, MQTT, KNX, Zigbee, Matter/Thread, BMS integration, and network design for dense multi-unit buildings.
• Knowledge of mobile (Flutter or native), PWA/web, backend services, dashboards, and Docker/Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability, telemetry, incident management, QA automation, and SRE practices.
• Knowledge of privacy by design, biometric/health data handling, and regional regulation such as UAE PDPL or GDPR equivalents.
• Have built and led multidisciplinary software and hardware engineering teams of 15 or more, with a strong hiring track record; comfortable in a fast-moving, founder-led environment.

Preferred qualifications

• A track record shipping products combining software and hardware, such as smart home, IoT, consumer electronics, robotics, wearables, or building technology, is preferred.
• Wellness technology exposure, including companies such as Whoop, Oura, Ultrahuman, or Eight Sleep, is a strong plus.
• Experience scaling from prototype to many sites or thousands of devices is preferred.
• Hands-on prototyping, pull-request review, and device debugging are preferred; pragmatic build-versus-buy judgment is valued.

Compensation and benefits

• Salary is described as competitive and aligned with market standards and role seniority, with additional benefits under the company's band structure.

Candidate suggestions