Head of Engineering

📍Relocation to Dubai, UAE preferred, but remote can be considered. 💰 45,000 - 50,000 AED per month Ready to take your engineering leadership career to Dubai? ☀️ We’re working with a growing telecom software company offering an experienced engineering leader the opportunity to relocate to Dubai and lead a team of 30+ engineers. Reporting directly to the CTO, you’ll own engineering delivery, ensuring releases ship on time and meet the standards required in live carrier networks. You’ll shape how teams work, develop the next generation of engineering leaders and oversee software that processes traffic for millions of subscribers across MENA and the GCC. You’ll tackle complex challenges across high-performance packet processing, telecom protocols and large-scale streaming analytics, working with a stack that includes C/DPDK, Go, Redpanda and ClickHouse. Joining a privately held business of around 50 people, you’ll have real influence over its engineering direction, from building out the leadership team to embedding AI agents into how software is developed and delivered. The Role: - Lead and grow a distributed engineering organisation, coaching team leads and developing future leaders. - Own delivery across the product portfolio, managing capacity, priorities and customer commitments alongside Product Management. - Work with the Agile Coach to establish consistent planning, Scrum and release processes across teams. - Coordinate releases across packet processing, control plane and analytics products, including offline upgrades in live operator networks. - Set engineering standards alongside System Architecture, covering code reviews, CI/CD, documentation and change management. - Partner with Quality & Release to build quality into every stage of development. - Embed AI coding agents and agentic engineering practices, helping teams develop the skills to use them effectively. - Lead incident response and technical escalations, using delivery and quality metrics to drive improvements. Requirements: - 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years leading multiple teams and at least 2 years managing team leads or managers. - Experience delivering software for telecom operators, with knowledge of technologies such as DPI, 3GPP packet core, RADIUS, GTP-C, Diameter, CGNAT or policy enforcement. - A track record of shipping on-premises systems software to enterprise or carrier customers, including field upgrades and long-term support. - Hands-on depth in C or C++ on Linux, plus Go or Python, with the technical credibility to challenge designs and lead production incidents. - Experience with distributed, highly available systems, event-driven architectures, APIs, microservices and containerised Linux deployments. Apply with your CV, or get in touch to learn more about the company, the projects and what they're looking to build.