Head of Engineering

• Role: Full-Time (40h/week)
• Location: Remote, B2B contract
• Official web
• Apps - Apple, Google
• You can check out our Benefits for more details!

💬 About Us

At Down, we’re not your typical dating app - we’re unapologetically real, a little cheeky, and all about empowering people to connect on their terms. With over 17 million users worldwide and ranked among the Top 10 most-downloaded dating apps in the U.S. last year, we’re making love (and everything in between) more transparent, more fun, and less awkward.

We're a lean, passionate 30-people team building something that actually helps people feel seen and understood - and now we’re looking for a Head of Engineering to help us scale, experiment boldly, and bring smoother love stories to life.

Overview

In your first months, your primary focus won't just be shipping code - it will be running the team and engineering the 'machine' that builds the product.

You will have direct ownership over our high-level architecture, experimentation systems, and data flow. While we use Ruby on Rails, we value your ability to scale systems and lead people over specific language syntax.

We need a Lead who can ensure our backend is a competitive advantage, not a bottleneck.

Expect a 50/50 split between leadership (planning, architecture, people management) and hands-on work (coding, code reviews, debugging).

You'll have a free hand on day-to-day technical decisions. The only things that go through the co-founders are quarterly planning and major technical changes - the kind that take weeks of work and shift direction. Everything else is yours to call.

🎯 What You'll Be Doing

• Own and drive the company's backend technical vision, architecture, and long-term scalability plans
• At first, manage 5 senior backend engineers and oversee 1-2 DevOps engineers (1:1s, hiring, firing, performance, growth).
  • Over time, take ownership of the full technical team (±15 members)
• Translate product goals into clear technical roadmaps, sprint plans, and engineering priorities
• Take architectural decisions around performance, infrastructure, reliability, and scaling for millions of users
• Establish and improve engineering processes, code quality standards, and deployment pipelines
• Own key technical challenges: performance bottlenecks, data flow, caching strategies, infrastructure decisions
• Code review and hands-on coding
• Run and support A/B testing and experimentation infrastructure (~5 experiments/week)
• Ensure API speed, uptime, data accuracy, and architectural consistency
• Design backend systems focused on scale, resilience, and fast iteration
• Implement security and privacy best practices

🧠 What We Need

• 8+ years of backend development experience in production environments
• Someone who has actually led engineering teams - not "informally mentored," but owned hiring, firing, performance reviews, and team structure.
• Someone who's held real responsibility: Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, CTO at a smaller company - that level.
  • You might currently be a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Engineering Manager - title matters less than whether you've had real ownership over people and systems
• Startup experience is non-negotiable. You've recently built or run engineering at a company under 50 people.
• Owned the backend architecture for a mobile-first, consumer-facing app.
• Still writes code and wants to. You're not looking to become a full-time manager.
• Strong communication skills - ability to explain tradeoffs, align stakeholders, and lead engineering discussions across a distributed team (EU and Asia).
• Proven experience scaling backend systems to high traffic (10k+ DAUs, ideally much higher).
• Experience driving technical planning, sprints, and feature delivery.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, databases, caching, and performance optimization.
• Decisive. We move fast. You need to make calls, not build consensus committees.

🙅🏻‍♀️ What We Don't Need

• Enterprise/big-company veterans who managed 50+ people and haven't touched code in years
• Process-heavy operators who want to install Jira workflows before shipping anything
• People who need to be told what to build

✨ Bonus Points

• Ruby on Rails experience (especially upgrades - we're migrating from Rails 5 to 7)
• Experience working in B2C startups (mobile, social, marketplace, etc)
• Strong product mindset (user-focused, impact-driven)
• Terraform / IaC familiarity
• Kubernetes in production

😎 You’re Our Kind of Teammate If You...

• Communicate clearly and confidently in English
• Have a "let’s get it DONE" mindset
• Are obsessively detail-oriented (you notice everything)
• Enjoy sharing ideas and building things together
• Can collaborate with a global, remote team like a pro