About the role

This role owns what is running. ContactVerse has a live estate across NEXXOS, Genius and the admin platform, deployed on AWS, with CI/CD and database migrations in scope. You would own the live estate, the quality of what ships, and three directors beneath you.

What you will do

• Own the live estate. Uptime, incidents, deployment and the migrations that touch shared development and production databases.
• Lead three directors. Software Engineering, Platform and Infrastructure, and Quality Engineering, hiring the ones not yet in post.
• Own build quality. That an endpoint marked built is built, that the schedule and the code agree, and that a defect reaching production is investigated rather than absorbed.
• Own release. Branch protection, pull request discipline, and a release process that is routine rather than eventful.
• Own the handover discipline. We engage contractors. Knowledge must survive their departure, which means recorded walkthroughs, written inventories and a sign-off that means something.
• Own on-call. Including the rota, the escalation path and genuine cover when someone is away.
• Partner with the Chief Architect. You own whether it runs; they own what it should look like. That boundary needs to work.
• Grow the engineers. Several of the team are early in their careers and have been shipping without much structure around them.
• Report honestly. Including when the news is bad, early.

Your first year

First 90 days. An honest picture of the live estate: what is deployed, what is fragile, and where the risk sits.

By six months. Incidents trending down and deployment becoming routine. Three directors in post and productive.

By twelve months. An engineering organisation that can absorb a departure without losing knowledge.

What you will bring

• Twelve years or more in engineering, including leading an organisation of twenty or more.
• Has inherited a codebase written by people who had already left, and made it safe.
• Has run a live SaaS estate with real customers and real incidents.
• Strong on release engineering, database migrations and the operational risk they carry.
• Has built an engineering management layer beneath them, hired directors, not only engineers.
• Has worked with contractors and staffing vendors as well as permanent teams.
• Technically credible: still reads code and reviews designs.
• Will report a slip the day it becomes visible rather than the week it becomes undeniable.

Nice to have

• Python, FastAPI and AWS, which is our stack.
• Multi-tenant SaaS with per-tenant data isolation.
• Contact-centre, voice or messaging platforms.
• Experience of an engineering organisation split across time zones.
• Has introduced SRE practice to a team that had none.

What you will work with

Python and FastAPI on AWS, GitHub Actions on self-hosted runners, Alembic migrations, services split by product and by industry vertical, and a documentation site generated from the requirement sheet and reconciled against the code.

What this role is not

Not an architect. The Chief Architect owns that. Not a project manager. You own the people, the quality and whether it runs.

How we work

The team works to a UK-aligned pattern, with the main working overlap in the evening IST. These hours are indicative and may change as the business changes; any change would be discussed rather than imposed. Development happens on company-provided remote machines. Everything is remote and nobody is in an office.

We are a small company and we write things down. Decisions are recorded, corrections are made to the source rather than to the output, and status is expected to be honest even when it is unwelcome.

Compensation and what we offer

• A long-term incentive, discussed at offer stage for senior appointments.
• Fully remote working, with company-provided equipment where the role requires it.
• A role with unusual scope for its level, because the organisation is being built rather than joined.
• Direct access to the founders. There are no layers between this role and the people making the decisions.

How we will assess you

We assess against three or four weighted signals agreed before we read a single CV, rather than against years of experience or a list of tools. Expect four stages:

• Introductory conversation with our People team. About 30 minutes, covering the role, your background and what you are looking for. This first conversation may be with an AI assistant; you will be told at the time and may ask to speak to a person instead.
• Conversation with the hiring manager. About 60 minutes, going deep on what you have done and how you think.
• A working session on a real ContactVerse problem. About 90 minutes. Not a whiteboard exercise and not a take-home test you do unpaid in your evenings.
• Final conversation with the founders. Covering fit, expectations and how we would work together.

We aim to complete the process within three weeks and to give you a decision, with reasons, within three working days of the final stage.

Equal opportunity

ContactVerse is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications regardless of age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. We select against the published signals for the role and nothing else. If you need an adjustment at any stage of the process, tell us and we will make it. It will not count against you.

Research consistently shows that some candidates apply only when they meet every criterion. If this role interests you and you meet most of what is listed, please apply.

How to apply

Write to career@contactverse.ai quoting reference POS-007, with your CV and a short note (a few paragraphs is plenty) on the part of this role you would most want to get your hands on, and why.