Head of Product Engineering

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering: part builder, part product thinker, and the go-to tech person for the founding team. We won’t hand you specs to code. We’ll hand you Kolet’s real problems (activation, conversion, partner integrations, ops pain…) and trust you to figure out what to build, ship it, and prove it worked. You’ll report to the CEO, lead a small AI-native team, and still spend most of your time building. This isn’t a CTO role on day one. But the ambition is real: prove your impact, grow the team, and you’ll have every opportunity to become Kolet’s CTO as we scale.

Missions

• Start from the problem, not the ticket. Sit with the team, dig into what’s really broken, and challenge the ask before writing a single line of code.

• Own the full loop: understand the problem → design a simple solution → build it end to end → ship it → check it’s used and actually moves the needle. Then iterate, simplify, or kill it.

• Cut scope like a pro: get a first version into users’ hands in days, not quarters.

• Build full-stack, with a strong backend backbone: platform, telecom integrations and core business logic, plus web and mobile whenever the problem calls for it. Most of your time stays hands-on.

• Be the founders’ single tech point of contact: turn business priorities into a short list of projects, arbitrate between impact, speed, quality and complexity, and flag trade-offs early and in plain words.

• Lead the team: organize who works on what, grow our two engineers (1 senior / 1 junior) into product engineers who own problems end to end, and help hire the next ones.

• Make AI our unfair advantage: use it every day to ship faster (code, UI from our design system, tests), and spot where it can solve real problems for other teams at Kolet.

• Keep prod healthy: CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, incident response. On this team, everyone looks at prod and feels responsible for it.

• Own quality & QA: test your own code and your team’s (unit, integration, end-to-end on critical flows like purchase and eSIM activation), run code reviews, and set the quality bar so we ship fast without breaking things for our travelers. There’s no separate QA team: quality is 100% on you, for your code and your team’s. It’s part of the job, not an afterthought.

How we work

• Daily stand-up: a quick sync to unblock each other and get back to building.

• 2-week sprints: clear priorities, a focused scope, and real room to ship.

• Sprint demo every 2 weeks: we show what we actually shipped to the whole team. Working product, not slides.

• Monthly retro: what worked, what didn’t, what we change next.

• You own your data: every engineer has their own dashboards to track how their features perform. Ship it, watch it, improve it.

Our stack

• Mobile: React Native, with CD via Expo Application Services (EAS) — auto-deploy to stores + preview builds on every PR

• Mobile state & data: Zustand (state management), React Query (backend calls)

• Frontend: React, deployed on Vercel

• Backend: Node.js / TypeScript, NestJS

• Database: PostgreSQL

• Cache: Redis

• Cloud & Infra: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), CI/CD, containerization

• Security: OAuth, JWT lifecycle, secret management, access control, encryption

• Telecom integrations: eSIM provisioning providers, roaming partners, multi-IMSI logic, event handling

• Architecture patterns: Distributed systems, async / event-driven workflows

We care less about ticking every box and more about your curiosity, learning speed, and potential to grow. If your path isn’t an obvious match on paper, tell us why you can grow into the role. We know that perfect candidates don’t exist. Even if not all of this applies to you, we’d love to learn more about you.

Experience

• 6+ years building and shipping products in production, ideally in startups or scale-ups where tech served the business.

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers: tech lead, lead dev, or de facto owner of a product area.

• A track record of owning features from problem to impact: you can tell us what you built, why, and what it changed for users or revenue.

• Full-stack TypeScript, with real backend depth and third-party API integrations in complex domains (telecom, payments, infra-heavy environments).

• You’ve handled production incidents and know what “good enough” looks like at an early stage.

Skills

• Sharp business sense: you quickly get what really matters for Kolet, ask the right questions, and push back on the need when it makes sense.

• Crystal-clear communication: code is a language, and so is talking to Ops, Growth or a partner. You understand precisely what’s being asked and explain trade-offs simply.

• AI-native: AI coding tools are part of how you build, design UI and test. Every single day.

• Solid technical foundations: Node.js architecture, PostgreSQL, secure systems (OAuth, JWT lifecycle, secret management), GCP / CI/CD / containers, async and event-driven workflows.

• Product & UX sense: you can ship a clean interface from a design system without waiting for a pixel-perfect mockup.

• Comfortable mentoring engineers and giving structured, constructive feedback.

  ⭐️ Bonus / Nice-to-have

  • Experience with NestJS, ReactNative or Next.js.

  • Exposure to telecom, payments, or integration-heavy domains.

  • Already built and maintained a React Native app used by thousands of users.

  • You’ve already worked as a Product Engineer (or the closest thing to it).

Personality

• You measure success in impact shipped, not tickets closed or how pretty the code looks. For you, code that doesn’t serve the business isn’t beautiful code.

• You get genuinely hooked on problems: the kind you keep thinking about in the shower, because you understand what’s at stake for the business and for our travelers.

• You love shipping fast without breaking things, and you enjoy growing engineers as much as writing code.

• You have a healthy distrust of complexity; whether in code or in org design; you’d rather ship a simple, boring solution than an elegant one nobody can maintain

• You thrive in an early-stage startup where pace, pragmatism, and impact matter, and you’re energized by being the operational engine that turns the founding team’s vision into a product that works, day after day.

Languages:

• Fluent in English / French is a plus.

We take hiring seriously, both to find the right person for Kolet and to give you a clear sense of whether Kolet is the right fit for you. We’re also mindful of your time: the full process takes 3 weeks maximum, and we commit to giving you feedback within 48 hours after each step. If it’s not a fit, we’ll tell you quickly.

Hiring process (detailed process on the notion link)

1. Introduction interview with Meryl (Chief of Staff / People Ops)

2. Deep-dive interview with our 3 founders

3. Case study with our tech team

4. Meet a CTO from Kolet’s network

5. Culture & work fit interview with the tech team and 1 to 2 other Kokos

How we evaluate

• Business sense: do you get to the real problem fast, and challenge the ask?

• Clarity: do you understand questions precisely and answer them clearly?

• Judgment: do you spot trade-offs between impact, speed, quality and complexity, and make the call?

• Bias to ship: can you cut scope, get something live fast, then measure whether it worked?

• Craft, quality & AI fluency: do you test and review seriously, and use AI to go faster without lowering the bar?

• Impact on others: do you unblock and grow the people around you, not just yourself?