Head of Engineering

About Ovrsea

Ovrsea is a next-generation digital freight forwarder on a mission to reinvent international transport. We combine human expertise with powerful technology to make global logistics simpler, more transparent, and more efficient for shippers around the world.

We are rapidly expanding worldwide, with 50+ offices across 13 countries, bringing our digital and operational capabilities closer to our customers and partners. As we scale globally, the quality, reliability, and velocity of our engineering organization are becoming more strategic than ever.

Your Role

We are looking for a Head of Engineering to structure, coach, empower our engineering team, and help shape the future of freight technology at Ovrsea.

Our tech team builds the platforms that power international freight operations end-to-end: multimodal quotations, shipment orchestration, predictive ETAs, document management, billing, and tightly integrated workflows. We focus on reliability, scalability, and great UX, while integrating automation, data insights, and AI-powered features where they bring tangible value.

We cherish a strong engineering culture rooted in developer experience, short feedback loops, and continuous delivery. We take inspiration from Accelerate, operate with lean processes, and carry out 20+ deployments per day. We believe that a fast iteration cycle is the cornerstone of product quality and long-term technical excellence.

Our engineering organization is structured into two squads, each composed of 2 Software Engineers, 1 Engineering Manager, and 1 Product Manager. The Head of Engineering will work closely with Antoine (CTO) and in direct partnership with both squads to strengthen execution, elevate technical standards, and support the growth of our core platform and our SaaS, OneChain.

What You'll Do

1. Technical Excellence & Architecture

Define and uphold Ovrsea's long-term technical vision and architectural standards across our core platforms.

Ensure high standards of code quality, performance, reliability, security, and documentation.

Lead major architectural evolutions and drive a pragmatic approach to technical debt.

Support the thoughtful adoption of automation, data, and AI-powered capabilities where they bring clear value.

2. Delivery & Operational Impact

Ensure teams ship predictably, with high quality, and with a strong sense of ownership.

Partner with PMs to ensure seamless delivery of new features across the internal TMS and OneChain SaaS.

Strengthen operational excellence: CI/CD, monitoring, observability, incident response, SLO culture, postmortems.

3. Cross-Functional Leadership

Act as a key partner to Product, Operations, Sales, and Business Growth in defining and executing Ovrsea's roadmap.

Represent Engineering in strategic product and business discussions, balancing technical constraints with customer value, operational needs, and market opportunity.

Collaborate closely with leadership to guide Ovrsea's transformation into an AI-augmented freight forwarder, identifying high-impact use cases and ensuring adoption across teams.

Work with international logistics partners to ensure our systems integrate deeply and reliably with their data and operational flows.

4. Team Leadership & People Management

Manage and coach Engineering Managers and senior engineers, providing clarity, feedback, and support for their growth.

Foster a healthy, collaborative engineering culture centered on autonomy, ownership, care, and continuous improvement.

Build a high-performing team by hiring exceptional engineers and raising the bar for technical and managerial excellence.

Create the organizational conditions for success: clear roles, aligned expectations, career progression frameworks, and effective communication rituals.

You're a Great Fit If…

You have strong experience leading engineering teams (including managing managers).

You combine a solid technical background with a thoughtful caring leadership style (we love the book Radical Candor).

You enjoy systems thinking, both in code architecture and org design.

You care deeply about developer experience and building teams that execute reliably.

You have excellent communication skills.

What You'll Find at Ovrsea

Direct impact on real-world logistics challenges used by hundreds of customers daily.

A caring engineering culture built on autonomy, trust, and continuous learning.

Opportunities to shape the future of the global freight industry.

A hybrid environment where outcomes matter more than hours.

Tech Stack

Although you won't write code daily, you'll guide teams working with:

Backend: TypeScript, , PostgreSQL, GraphQL

Frontend: React, Vite, Apollo

Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform

Data: Dagster, dbt, Metabase

AI & Automation: internal agents, AI-augmented workflows, n8n automation

 Hiring Process

Screening call (30 minutes): with Nicolas (Head of Engineering) and Antoine (CTO)

Live technical test (1h): a live coding session of 1h with two software engineers of our team.

Project interview (1h): an interview where you present a cross-functional initiative you led, focusing on how you aligned stakeholders, guided technical and organizational decisions, and drove team impact.

Case Study - Architecture × Cross-Functional Collaboration (1h30): a merged interview exploring technical vision, AI adoption, multi-squad coordination, and decision-making with Product

Speed recruiting: meet 4 people across Engineering, Product, and Operations

Reference checks