Director of Engineering

About the role

We're rebuilding Wheely to be the fastest and most reliable ride-hailing app on the planet — one where both the passenger app and the driver app stay responsive on a flaky signal in the back of an apartment building, keep working behind censorship firewalls, and don't drop the real-time guarantees a moving car depends on.

We're also adding something nobody in this category has built seriously: privacy as a product, not a compliance footnote.

This role owns the core that makes all of that possible: the platform, the infrastructure, the privacy primitives the rest of engineering builds on top of, and the internal agent harness that lets teams across the company automate work that used to need humans.

You'll inherit a mostly-Go codebase and a small group of strong engineers. You'll also inherit a genuinely open question on most of what matters. Is microservices the right end state, or did we default into it? How should a backend look in 2026 when AI has absorbed a large share of routine engineering work, when QA isn't a separate function, and when a small senior team paired with a few unusually strong grads can outship a 2019-style org several times its size?

Our main engineering hub is in Cyprus. We're now building up London as a second hub, and this role is part of that — you'd be one of the first senior engineering leaders on the ground here, helping shape what London looks like as a location, who we hire into it, and what work belongs where.

What you'll actually do

• Own the technical direction of the platform end to end — including the architectural questions that haven't been answered yet, like whether to keep moving toward microservices or reconsider.
• Make real-time work, end to end. Driver app especially (location, dispatch, ride state) all of it under adversarial network conditions.
• Lead the privacy story on the engineering side — what's actually different about how data flows through our systems vs. every other ride-hailing company.
• Own and grow the agent harness so other teams can wire AI into workflows that used to need people. Today it's Rust. Tomorrow's shape is yours.
• Help build London as an engineering hub. That means hiring into it, deciding (with the rest of the leadership team) what work makes sense in London vs Cyprus, and setting the culture for a new office while staying tightly coupled to the main hub.

What we need from you

• You have designed backend systems from scratch (not only maintained, scaled, or rewritten what someone else built). We'll spend real time in the interview on the trade-offs you made and why.
• Real-time systems experience at consumer scale.
• Several years of managing engineers, with hiring and firing calls you'd defend in detail. Total headcount matters less to us than the calibre and the outcomes.
• Based in London. We sponsor visas: you don't need to be in the UK today, you just need to be willing to move. Regular travel to our Cyprus hub expected, especially early on.

What we offer

• Office-based role in West London, four days a week with flexible start and finish times, plus one remote day of your choice
• Employee stock options plan
• Private medical and dental insurance
• Life and critical illness cover
• Latest-generation MacBook Pro and 4k display
• Monthly credit towards Wheely journeys
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Professional development stipend
• Relocation support, including visa sponsorship and allowance