Head of Engineering

Summary

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to join HeyCharge and lead the development of our EV charging technology. You’ll oversee the architecture, planning, and execution of our full product ecosystem — from embedded firmware and hardware to mobile apps, backend systems, and web front ends. Your job is to keep HeyCharge’s technology secure, scalable, and ahead of the competition.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You move fluently between domains — supporting team members working on BLE firmware one moment and Flutter SDKs or backend APIs the next. You set technical direction, build and mentor the engineering team, and ship the systems that make reliable EV charging work everywhere — even underground, even offline.

About HeyCharge

HeyCharge makes EV charging work in places it was never supposed to — underground garages, multi-tenant buildings, and any other concrete-and-rebar environment where cellular signal goes to die. Our offline-first SecureCharge platform uses Bluetooth for local session authentication and Zigbee mesh for inter-charger load management and cloud sync. No internet required at the charger; no compromise on reliability or billing accuracy.

We’re Munich-headquartered with team members across Germany, Ukraine, and the US, selling into property managers, utilities, and OEMs across Europe, the US, and Latin America. Our partners include Vonovia (Europe’s largest residential landlord), Easee and Emobi. We’re backed by Y Combinator and EU innovation funding, with a culture that’s Google-rooted on engineering, AI-first and automation-first on operations, and allergic to bureaucracy that doesn’t earn its keep.

Responsibilities

• Technical leadership across embedded software, hardware, backend, mobile, and web.
• Architecture and roadmap. Define and evolve the technical architecture and roadmap for HeyCharge’s technology platform.
• Cross-stack execution. Oversee development of BLE/Zigbee firmware, Flutter mobile apps and SDKs, Google Cloud backend services, and React-based web applications.
• Player-coach. Support team members across disciplines, moving fluently between hardware, firmware, and software topics — and writing code where it’s the fastest path.
• Engineering culture. Drive automation, scalability, and a quality bar that holds when hardware is three floors underground and there’s no internet rescue.
• Cross-functional partnership. Collaborate with product and operations to translate vision into delivered solutions.
• Hiring and mentoring. Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering organization.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background — comfortable reading and writing production code across multiple parts of the stack.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform and at least working familiarity with the rest of our stack: C/C++ on the embedded side; TypeScript, Flutter/Dart, Node.js, NestJS, Angular on the application side.
• Experience with BLE, Zigbee, and wireless SoCs / radio stacks — or the credible ability to learn them fast.
• Mobile app development (Flutter) and cross-platform SDK experience.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate seamlessly between embedded, mobile, backend, and frontend domains. Generalists beat specialists for this role.
• Strong leadership and communication skills; the ability to set direction without becoming a bottleneck.
• Automation-first mentality and attention to reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
• Experience with physical product development is a strong plus.

Personal Characteristics

• Builder mindset — you create order, structure, and systems that make life easier; you reach for the keyboard before the slide deck.
• Ownership mentality — you take responsibility for what your team ships, all the way through to deployed reality.
• Automation-first — you instinctively look for ways to remove repetitive work rather than just doing it faster.
• Hands-on and pragmatic — you’d rather solve a problem than write a memo about it; the team’s best week is one where you shipped alongside them.
• Adaptable — you’re comfortable in a high-growth, ever-changing environment where the right answer this quarter might not be the right answer next.

Who this role is not for

• If your reflex is to plan the team before you’ve done the work, this isn’t the right environment. The team grows once you’ve personally shipped what the role demands — firmware, backend services, mobile SDKs, all of it.
• If you’ve spent your career on only backend or only embedded or only mobile, the cross-domain demand here will exhaust you. We need someone who’s fluent across the stack on day one.
• If you want to lead engineering mostly through reviews, meetings, and process, this is the wrong company. Our Head of Engineering writes code, debugs firmware on the bench, and pushes pull requests alongside the team.
• If you need a fully defined architecture, a written engineering ladder, and a steering committee before you can act — you’ll be frustrated within 90 days.

Closing

If you want to lead the engineering of systems that make EV charging work everywhere — even underground, even offline, even on hardware where there’s no internet rescue — we’d love to hear from you. The work is real, the constraints are real, and we’re hiring the leader who’ll make sure the platform holds up to both.