Head of Engineering

Pillar was founded in 2025. Today, we are 90+ people, serve 1000+ customers, raised €15.2M (pre-seed and seed round) and are expanding internationally. We are building the financial operating system for construction: bringing AI, automation and modern software to an enormous industry still full of slow, fragmented processes. We are looking for a Head of Engineering who has built production systems with their own hands, loves making a platform stronger as it grows and wants to lead the engineers who build it. Why join now We have product-market fit and our customers, users and data are growing fast. Now we need someone who makes sure the platform holds as everything grows many times over, without slowing down delivery. The mission Own the health, scalability and day-to-day operation of Pillar's platform: lead our engineers, keep delivery fast and the system strong, side by side with our CPO. What you will do
• Lead and grow our engineers, who report directly to you.
• Make sure the system scales as customers, users and data per customer grow.
• Make the infrastructure calls that keep the platform easy to run, weighing each option against its DevOps and running cost.
• Set and look after the standards for architecture, code quality, testing and reviews across the monorepo.
• Map technical debt, prioritise it and pay it down with a plan everyone can see.
• Balance short-term delivery and long-term health, and make the trade-offs clear to Product.
• Run engineering operations day to day: reliability, incidents, releases, on-call and team rituals. Who we are looking for Builders at heart who think at scale and lead with care
• You have built and shipped production systems yourself, and you can still go deep in code reviews and design docs.
• You have experience in B2B SaaS, ideally multi-tenant platforms with data-heavy workflows.
• You have lived a 1 to 10 phase: scaling a product, its architecture and its engineering team after product-market fit.
• You have made infrastructure and architecture decisions at scale, and paid down technical debt without stopping delivery.
• You have managed engineers directly: hiring, setting goals, giving feedback and helping people grow.
• You explain technical trade-offs in simple words, to Product and to people who do not write code.
• You stay calm during incidents and help the team learn from them, without blame.
• You are AI-native: AI is already part of how you build and how your team works.
• Fluent English. Based in Barcelona or happy to relocate.
• Nice to have: deep Postgres, Supabase and Vercel (and knowing when to move off them), AI agents in production, ERP, fintech or construction, Italian or Spanish. How we work
• Small squads, high autonomy, no unnecessary layers.
• AI-first, in the product and in the way we build.
• Simple by design: we keep DevOps overhead low and choose managed tools until there is a real reason not to.
• Pillar is not for you if you are looking for a large platform team to manage. We are building it, and you will lead it. Hiring process 01 CV screening 02 30-min People call with Marta 03 1-hour conversation with Lorenzo, usually in person 04 Business case, prepared at home (3 to 4 hours) 05 Business case presentation with Lorenzo (1 hour, online) 06 Conversations with our co-founders Paolo and Gabriel 07 Optional: meet our product managers

What we offer
• Gross salary 100.000-120.000 €, based on experience
• A real leadership seat: you will own the platform as it scales, not just keep the lights on
• A team to grow: engineers who report to you and want to learn from you
• The chance to build something that lasts: the system you shape will change how an entire industry works
• An AI-native team: AI is part of the whole development cycle
• Our Barcelona product hub, with Italian roots and a team in Milan
• People who care: a team that celebrates wins together, gives honest feedback and has fun along the way.