Head of Engineering
About Tawk.to Tawk.to is the world's leading business messaging platform, enabling millions of businesses to communicate and engage with their customers in real time. We are a globally distributed, bootstrapped company with a simple mission — to help businesses meet their customers where they are. As part of our continuous growth, we are seeking a Head of Engineering to lead and scale our global engineering function. This role requires a strategic leader with a strong technical foundation and a proven ability to build and lead high-performing, distributed teams. Role Overview You will co-own the entire technical direction of tawk.to with the CTO and be the ultimate owner of engineering execution, reliability, and velocity. You will oversee all engineering teams — including web, mobile, backend, DevOps, QA, and infrastructure — while partnering closely with Product, Design, and Operations to deliver exceptional product experiences to millions of users worldwide. This is a deeply technical, hands-on leadership role: you will still dive into architecture discussions, review critical PRs, and be the incident commander during major incidents. Key Responsibilities 1. Strategy & Technical Leadership ● Co-define and drive the engineering vision in partnership with the CTO, ensuring alignment with product and business strategy. ● Lead the evolution of platform architecture to support global scalability, performance, and reliability. ● Translate product goals into actionable engineering plans and measurable outcomes. 2. Team Leadership & Development ● Lead, mentor, and scale engineering teams across multiple time zones (Malaysia, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Latvia, and beyond). ● Build a culture of accountability, innovation, and collaboration within a remote-first environment. ● Set and monitor performance standards and career growth paths for engineering managers and leads. ● Ensure effective communication, alignment, and collaboration across distributed teams. 3. Engineering Excellence ● Hands-on partnership with the CTO on technical architecture, from backend systems to APIs, frontend, and mobile apps. ● Strategic use of AI inside engineering (developer productivity, code analysis, automated QA) ● Champion world-class Developer Experience (DX) by shaping tools, processes, documentation, and engineering workflows that enable fast, safe, and joyful development. ● Ensure reliability, uptime, and performance through proactive monitoring and optimization. ● Partner with DevOps to ensure scalability, cost efficiency, and operational resilience. ● Implement robust processes for development, CI/CD, testing, and deployment. ● Ensure security, compliance (SOC2, GDPR), and data-protection standards are exceeded. 4. Execution & Delivery ● Oversee delivery of product and infrastructure roadmaps, ensuring timely and high-quality releases. ● Drive continuous improvement in velocity, quality, and operational efficiency. 5. Cross-Functional Collaboration ● Partner with Product and Design to balance innovation with execution. ● Collaborate with Operations, HR, and Finance for resource planning, budgeting, and vendor management. Qualifications & Experience Education: Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field. Experience & Background: ● 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5+ years in engineering leadership roles. ● Proven experience leading distributed or global engineering teams. ● Proven experience managing high-traffic, customer-facing SaaS platforms. You understand the complexities of real-time systems (messaging, streaming, notifications). Technical Expertise: Our primary stack includes: ● Backend: Node.js / TypeScript, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Kafka + Google Pub/Sub, Redis ● Frontend: Vue.js (admin dashboards and internal tools) ● Infrastructure: GCP + AWS, Kubernetes, high-availability distributed systems ● Real-time layer: WebSockets at massive scale, low-latency event delivery We value deep experience with any similar high-scale, real-time stack (e.g., Go, Elixir, Java, .NET) as long as you’ve successfully led large Node.js or JavaScript-heavy organizations before or can ramp extremely quickly. Strong hands-on background in: ● Event-driven architectures and message queues at scale ● Horizontal scaling of document/no-SQL databases (MongoDB sharding, Elasticsearch clusters) ● Cost-optimized cloud operations ● Modern SRE practices, observability, and chaos engineering Preferred Attributes: Prior experience in SaaS, messaging, communications, or large-scale web applications. Strong business acumen with an understanding of product-led growth models. Passion for mentoring and developing technical leaders. Ability to thrive in a transparent, results-driven culture. What We Offer: Leadership role with direct impact on a globally recognized product. Competitive salary Growth opportunities in a flat, high-trust organization. Collaborative and transparent work culture with global exposure. Apply To This Job