Head of Engineering

Able is the trust layer for work: an AI-enhanced staffing platform, live in London with around 500 workers and 48 venues, where verified workers are instantly bookable. Alongside it we are building a credentialing product, currently in stealth and funded by Innovate UK. Our first market is UK healthcare, then Europe.

We are hiring a senior, hands-on Head of Engineering to own Able's technology: both products, the architecture, the roadmap, and the team that comes after you. The role starts on contract so we can work together before committing, and is intended to become a permanent position as Head of Engineering and, in time, CTO. The founder sets the product direction and runs the business; you run the technology, and you tell her when the plan is wrong.

Engagement

Full time. Contract for the first three to six months, moving to a permanent role as Head of Engineering, with a share-option grant on conversion

Start

December 2026

Location

UK-based with the right to work in the UK. Hybrid, with regular time in person in London

Reports to

Alexandra Wright, Founder and CEO

What you will own

The Able marketplace

A web platform with WhatsApp onboarding and booking, vector-search matching of workers to shifts, an admin panel, and payments moving to open banking. It works, it has paying customers, and it has a backlog of matching and reliability work waiting for an owner.

Our credentialing product

In stealth, with a live pilot. We will tell you more at interview.

Building with frontier AI

A small team scales a platform by building with the most capable AI there is. You use frontier models and AI coding agents as standard, you invest your own time in staying at the cutting edge of what AI can do for engineering, and you bring the team with you. You also know where these tools fail, and you design for it.

Ethics, safety and compliance

Able's matching is pseudonymised and every disputed decision goes to a person. ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials are under way, with NHS requirements to follow, and we handle special-category data under UK GDPR. You make sure the architecture, the safeguards and the paperwork tell the same story.

The team

You recruit and lead a junior engineer, and later a second engineer, within the budget set by the seed round.

Quantum, as a research track

Able has quantum applications in development for the platform, led by the founder with outside expert input. You assess what runs on today's hardware and simulators and what waits, and keep the engineering and the IP record aligned.

Who this suits

You have led engineering at a startup or scale-up, you still write code most days, and you want to build the team rather than inherit one.

Must have

• Eight or more years in software engineering, including leading a team or a technical function
• Builds with frontier AI every day: AI coding agents, LLM and ML services in production, evaluation design, and the judgement to know when a model should decide and when a person must
• A working grasp of AI risk, ethics and safety, applied in production rather than only discussed
• Full-stack and cloud production experience; comfortable choosing and moving infrastructure
• Mobile delivery: shipped at least one app through the App Store and Google Play
• Security and data-protection fluency: you have built or run systems handling sensitive personal data
• Writes clearly and briefly; decisions are recorded in writing
• Based in the UK with the right to work here, and able to be in London in person regularly

Strong to have

• Credentialing, background checks, regulated workforces or healthcare
• Open banking payments
• Quantum computing: working knowledge of quantum algorithms for optimisation or machine learning and the hybrid toolchains (Qiskit, Cirq or PennyLane)
• Kotlin and Swift
• Vector search and the WhatsApp Business API
• ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials from the engineering side