🌍 About Abusix
At Abusix, we're a fully remote company united by a shared mission: to make the internet a safer place. Our small, globally distributed team spans multiple countries—from the U.S. to Europe to the Philippines—and thrives in a culture rooted in trust, ownership, and collaboration.
We've been pioneers in the network abuse management space for 15 years, back when abuse management was unknown to 99% of people. Today, we transform complex network and security data into actionable insights through our three Guardian products: real-time blocklists against email threats, SaaS tool for network abuse management, and threat intelligence to prevent attacks.
Our vision is to build a global platform where internet stakeholders collaborate by sharing relevant, real-time security data to solve abuse and cybersecurity challenges together.
🧩 The Role
As our Head of Engineering, you lead Abusix’s 10-person engineering team (including SRE) and own the technical direction and architecture behind our platform. You turn engineering into a performance-driven, product-minded unit, connecting what the team builds to the outcomes it creates for the security teams who rely on Abusix every day.
In this role, you make the handoff between product and engineering work, unblock delivery, and keep releases predictable. From day one, you’re hands-on in the codebase: shipping alongside the team, feeling the same friction they feel, and shifting the balance toward architecture and leadership as you earn the team’s trust. As a player-coach, you lead through the work itself: hands-on and technically credible, bringing your own leadership concept and keeping engineering closely connected and visible across the rest of the company.
You report to the CEO, are part of the leadership team, and work closely with the product team.
💥 The Impact You Make in This Role
- Lead the 10-person engineering team, including SRE: setting priorities, delegating, running 1:1s, and supporting growth, to build a performance-driven, product-minded unit that ships things that matter.
- Own technical direction and architecture for the platform, setting and enforcing engineering principles, to keep the codebase and systems something the team can build on with confidence.
- Stay hands-on in the codebase, writing and reviewing production code alongside the team, to earn trust, feel the same friction engineers feel, and ship real improvements to the team’s day-to-day work.
- Improve the product-to-engineering handoff: tickets, subtasks, estimates, and refinement, with the product team, to turn roadmap intent into predictable delivery.
- Communicate roadmap, status and risk to product and leadership, and bring business context back to the team, to keep engineering visible, trusted, and easy to plan around.
- Unblock delivery and drive predictable releases, so the team consistently ships and the rest of the company can plan around engineering.
- Improve engineering practices, including how the team uses AI in development, to raise the bar on what “good” looks like.
- Hire, onboard and retain engineers as the team grows, to build an organization that can scale past you.
🦄 The Skills and Traits That Let You Thrive in This Role
- Proven experience as a Head of Engineering, Engineering Director, or senior technical lead: you’ve grown a team before and shifted from hands-on coding into architecture and leadership. Background in Product Management is a plus.
- A player-coach mentality: technically excellent and genuinely hands-on, just as comfortable in the codebase as in a design discussion.
- Experience building and shaping an engineering team or organization from the ground up, ideally in a fast-paced startup or scale-up.
- A track record of working closely with a product function: you understand product priorities and can challenge or improve requirements, not just implement them.
- A go-getter mentality: you prioritize what matters and make sure it gets done.
- Strong…