Head of Engineering - AdminBolt (Remote, EU)

AdminBolt.com is a hosting control panel built for providers running fleets of servers: flat per-server pricing, in-place migration from cPanel and other panels, CloudLinux and Imunify360 officially supported, LiteSpeed integration, available on DigitalOcean Marketplace. It runs on 10,000+ servers worldwide.

We are looking for a Head of Engineering who will own delivery end to end: the team, the release schedule, quality, and communication. You report directly to the CEO.

What you will own

• Release process: a fixed release cadence, code freeze, go/no-go decisions. Releases ship on the planned day, unfinished work moves to the next one.
• You run the team day to day: who works on what, in what order, and by when. Nobody waits for work, nobody works outside the plan.
• Quality: staging, testing and the release gate. No release goes out with open High/Highest issues.
• Production customers: a defined SLA for fixes blocking hosting providers in production, and clear incident communication.
• Planning: estimates, release scope, and accountability for delivering it.
• Weekly status to the CEO: what shipped, what slipped and why, risks.
• AI-native workflow for the whole team: a shared standard for agent-based development, not individual tooling preferences.
• Hiring and onboarding as the team grows.
• Hands-on coding: roughly 30-50% of your time.

What we expect

• 7+ years of backend engineering, PHP/Laravel strongly preferred.
• Solid Linux systems knowledge: packages, services, nginx, PHP-FPM, permissions, updates.
• 2+ years leading a small engineering team with real delivery responsibility.
• Experience shipping self-hosted/on-premise software: updates rolled out to thousands of customer machines, not only a single SaaS deployment.
• Daily, serious use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar) on a large production codebase. You know how to:
• run parallel agent sessions and merge their output,
• write repo context and specs that give agents consistent results,
• spot where AI-generated code fails: security, permissions, data migrations, system-level code,
• build guardrails: generated tests, CI that blocks merges, AI-assisted review before human review,
• measure the actual throughput gain.
• Hosting industry knowledge. You understand how providers operate and what breaks their business: cPanel/Plesk/DirectAdmin, WHMCS or Blesta, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed, Imunify360, shared vs VPS vs bare metal, migrations, account isolation, mail and DNS.
• Clear written English. Most of the communication is async.
• 2+ years leading a small engineering team where you were accountable for people and deadlines, not only for architecture. You have dealt with missed deadlines, underperformance and conflicting priorities, and can tell us exactly how.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience working at a hosting provider (sysadmin, platform or panel team).
• Experience with security audits or handling CVE response at scale.
• Experience with marketplace images (AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure).

Hiring process

• Short intro call.
• Code review task: you get an AI-generated PR and find what is wrong with it.
• Delivery scenario: release planned for tomorrow, staging is broken, a production customer is waiting for a fix. Walk us through your first two hours.
• Final conversation with the CEO.

What you get

• Full ownership of engineering in a product used by hosting providers worldwide.
• Direct line to the CEO, no layers.
• Remote, EU timezone overlap required.
• B2B contract, competitive compensation