Lead Developer - Head of Engineering

Lead Developer (Head of Engineering designate)Location: Dubai, London, New YorkDepartment: ITReports To: CTOAbout us:GlobalDrum empowers the online media sector to own, understand, and monetise their most valuable social audiences. We are solving a business problem without precedent resulting in the redistribution of revenues in a $247Bn sector. If this sounds too ambitious for you, then don't apply.Job Description:We are looking for a visionary, Lead Developer to become our Director of Engineering residing at the heart of our engineering function: the bridge between product vision and technical execution on our AI-native, multi-tenant platform.You will work with platform and revenue product owners to translate the product roadmap into a well-run engineering backlog, own our technical architecture end-to-end, and build and nurture a focused, high-performing core engineering team, all while staying hands-on in the codebase and leading by example.Key Responsibilities:Roadmap to Backlog: Translate the product roadmap into a clear, well-prioritised engineering backlog, sprint plans, and delivery milestones.Own the Architecture: Take end-to-end ownership of the technical architecture for our scalable, cloud-agnostic, multi-tenant platform.Nurture the Team: Recruit, mentor, and grow a small, core engineering team, building a culture of ownership and craftsmanship.Establish Standards: Define and enforce engineering standards, coding guidelines, architecture principles, and best practices (code review, testing, CI/CD).Stay Hands-On: Remain an active, hands-on contributor in the codebase, writing production code and heavily leveraging AI coding assistants and agentic development workflows.Lead by Example: Set the technical and cultural bar for the team through your own work, decision-making, and problem-solving.Architect & Develop: Design and build real-time, event-driven data pipelines, secure multi-tenant solutions, payment integrations, and robust public APIs.Agentic Capabilities: Build and integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) solutions to support advanced agentic capabilities.Scrum Ownership: Run and participate in Scrum ceremonies, owning complex architectural epics from planning through delivery.Required Skills & Qualifications:Proven experience translating product strategy and roadmaps into actionable engineering backlogs and delivery plans.Experience building, mentoring, and growing a small core engineering team. A genuine “player-coach,” not purely an individual contributor or purely a manager.Deep expertise in Solution Architecture, AWS, and cloud-agnostic backend design, with direct, hands-on ownership of an architecture end-to-end.Extensive hands-on experience in large-scale “AI” development; fluent in coding assistants and agentic workflows.Track record establishing engineering standards and best practices (code quality, testing, CI/CD) within an early-stage startup environment using Scrum.Proven experience designing real-time, event-driven architectures.Qualifications:Strong domain knowledge in SaaS/PaaS, Multi-tenant solutions, MarTech, and AdTech.Direct experience integrating complex payment gateways (e.g., Stripe) and building MCP layers.Bonus Skills (Nice to Have)Exposure to the following will make you a standout candidate:Deep understanding of the Media and/or News technology ecosystems.Experience in AdTech (advertising networks, programmatic bidding, ad serving).Startup/Scale-up background, bringing a strategic, client-centric, and solution-oriented mindset to technical problem-solving.What You'll Gain:The chance to influence a ground-breaking AI platform for the online media sector.Competitive equity options package, and salary in an exciting venture.Significant personal and corporate growth opportunities.Flexible working environment