HEAD OF ENGINEERING (HANDS-ON) | PRODUCT-MINDED

ABOUT MOONSTAR

Moonstar.ai is building the AI-powered performance platform for frontline teams.
We help hospitality, retail and franchise businesses improve sales performance, employee engagement and operational execution through behavioural science, AI and data.
We’re a lean team that believes startups win through speed, simplicity and exceptional product engineering—not through large teams.
Our platform serves more than 10,000 frontline employees, powered by a modern serverless architecture built on AWS, React Native and Expo. A team of just three engineers manages the entire platform because we optimise for leverage, not complexity.
Moonstar is an award-winning, fast-growing company, recognised among the UK’s most innovative companies by Innovate UK and incubated at the Harvard University Innovation Labs. We work with enterprise clients across Europe, North & South America and the Middle East, helping tens of thousands of frontline employees perform at their best every day.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We’re looking for a hands-on Head of Engineering who thinks like a founder. We value people who are exceptionally ambitious, extremely bright, hardworking and unwaveringly candid. If you are looking for an opportunity to lead Engineering at a high-impact startup, then Moonstar is the place for you.
This is an 80% hands-on coding and architecture role and 20% leadership and strategy. You’ll spend most of your time building product alongside the team while partnering closely with the CEO and Head of Product to shape technical direction, product strategy and engineering culture.
We’re looking for someone who loves solving client problems, shipping quickly and using technology to create business impact.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Build Product
• Partner with the CEO and Product Owner to translate client problems into simple, testable product experiments.
• Think in MVPs, rapid iterations and measurable outcomes.
• Ship continuously and refine based on client feedback.

Lead Engineering
• Write production code across our frontend, backend and mobile applications.
• Own technical architecture and engineering standards.
• Coach and mentor a small team of two engineers through hands-on leadership.
• Foster a culture of ownership, simplicity and continuous improvement.

Own the Platform
Take ownership of our engineering platform, including:
• AWS Serverless architecture (Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge)
• Infrastructure-as-Code with AWS CDK
• GitHub Actions and deployment pipelines
• Database performance and schema evolution
• React Native mobile apps and React web platform

Build an AI-First Engineering Team
Use AI as a force multiplier across engineering—from development and testing to documentation and product delivery. We expect our Head of Engineering to continuously explore how AI can help us build faster and smarter.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Product-Minded
You enjoy solving client problems as much as technical ones. You naturally think in MVPs, experimentation and rapid learning.

Hands-on Technical Leader
You’re happiest writing code alongside your team. You lead through example, coaching and technical excellence.

Modern Full-Stack Engineer
Strong experience with:
• TypeScript
• React
• Node.js
Experience with React Native and Expo is highly desirable.
Serverless Architecture
You’re comfortable building and operating modern serverless systems using AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway and EventBridge. Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (AWS CDK) is a strong advantage.

Database Pragmatist
You’re confident writing SQL, designing schemas and managing migrations, ideally with PostgreSQL.

AI-Native
You actively use AI to improve engineering productivity and enjoy experimenting with new tools that create meaningful leverage.

High Ownership
You thrive in small teams, move quickly, take initiative and think like a co-founder. You challenge ideas, simplify complexity and care deeply about building products that clients love.

OUR TECH STACK

Frontend
• React
• React Native
• Expo
Backend
• Node.js
• TypeScript
• AWS Lambda
• API Gateway
• EventBridge
Database
• PostgreSQL (PlanetScale)
Infrastructure
• AWS CDK
• GitHub Actions
• Expo OTA Updates

WHY JOIN MOONSTAR?

• Work directly with the CEO and influence company strategy.
• Shape the future of an AI-powered product with measurable client impact.
• Build with a small, high-performing engineering team.
• Join a company that values speed, ownership, simplicity and continuous learning.
• Competitive salary plus meaningful equity.

If you’re excited about what we are doing, we’d love to meet you. Please drop us a line with your resume at [email protected]