Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering (hands-on) · Traverse Health · Barcelona-based, remote-first · EUR 70k base + up to EUR 30k annual bonus (EUR 100k on-target) · stock options · full-time
Role summary
Role summary
We are hiring a hands-on Head of Engineering to lead our tech team and own how our real-world evidence and real-world data products get designed, built and shipped.
Traverse Health started by running individual studies on a federated healthcare data platform. That platform now carries products: Therapy Monitor, the Diabetes Command Center, and more in the pipeline. We need one person who is accountable for the technology behind them and who leads the engineers building it.
This is a player-coach role. You will own architecture decisions, lead a team of six engineers, and write a significant share of the code yourself. You report to the CEO. Your bonus is tied to the same company targets as the rest of the leadership team.
What we are building
Our products turn hospital and medical-device data into tools that clinicians, researchers and life-science partners use every day.
Therapy Monitor : data-driven monitoring of how therapies perform in real-world patient populations.
Disease Command Centers : platform with rich functionality that brings device and clinical data together for disease care teams.
Federated data platform : the foundation under both. Data stays inside each hospital, is harmonised to OMOP, and is analysed through privacy-preserving federated queries.
We deploy in hospitals across several regions, including KSA, UAE as well as in countries in SEA and LatAm, on both enterprise (InterSystems IRIS for Health) and open-source (PostgreSQL, containerised, cloud-native) stacks.
Mission of the role
Your mission is to turn a capable group of specialists into one product engineering team, and to turn our platform into a family of products that can be deployed repeatedly.
That means:
Taking product platforms from early versions to robust, maintainable products
Building the next products on shared components instead of starting from scratch each time
Making hospital onboarding a standard, repeatable process
Giving the team clear technical direction, priorities and a steady delivery rhythm
You are responsible for what gets built, how it is built, and that it ships.
The team you will lead
OMOP data engineer
DevOps engineers
Visualization engineers
AI/ML engineer
Full-stack developer
You will also work daily with our clinical, research and business colleagues, who bring the medical and customer context for each product.
Key responsibilities
Key responsibilities1. Technical leadership of the team
Lead, mentor and unblock the engineering team day to day
Set priorities and milestones together with the CEO and the clinical and business leads
Establish a predictable delivery cadence: planning, code review, releases
Help hire as the team grows
2. Hands-on product development
Build core parts of the products yourself, especially backend services, APIs and data flows
Expect to spend roughly half your time on design and code
Turn clinical and customer requirements into working features, together with the clinical team
3. Architecture ownership
Own the architecture of the products and the platform; there is no separate architect
Define the shared components that every product reuses: ingestion, identity and access, federated query, analytics, dashboards
Decide where to use the enterprise stack (IRIS for Health, HL7/FHIR ingestion) and where the open stack (PostgreSQL, containerised ETL, API-driven federated query orchestration)
4. Hospital and device onboarding
Standardise how new hospitals are connected: secure data nodes, anonymisation workflows, OMOP transformation
Oversee integration of medical-device data into patient and clinician-facing products
Keep deployments aligned with local regulatory and data-residency requirements
5. Quality, security and governance
Ensure data boundaries and governance models are respected in every deployment
Maintain auditability and compliance awareness
Drive testing, automation and reproducible infrastructure
What this role is and is not
This role combines three things in one person: team leader, lead architect and senior engineer.
It is not a pure management role. You will write code and review code every week.
It is not an advisory architect role. You own the outcome, not only the design.
It is not a project manager role. You lead through technical judgement and example, not through status reports.
Your background
Strong-fit profiles
Lead backend or platform engineer who already leads a team and still codes
Engineering lead or tech lead who has taken a data-heavy product from early version to production
Founding engineer, CTO or first engineering hire at a small product company
Healthcare interoperability or d