Head of Engineering

Job Title: Head of Engineering

Employment Type: Perm

Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

About Horizontal: Established since 2003 in the US, Horizontal solves complex challenges across two distinct businesses: Horizontal Digital and Horizontal Talent. We are consistently recognized for being a top workplace and one of the fastest growing private companies. Horizontal Talent specializes in staffing for IT, Digital & Creative and Business & Strategy markets. We have global offices in US, UAE, India, Malaysia and Australia.

Role Overview

You will co-own the entire technical direction of company 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 2. Team Leadership & Development 3. Engineering Excellence 4. Execution & Delivery 5. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Oversee delivery of product and infrastructure roadmaps, ensuring timely and high-quality releases.
• Drive continuous improvement in velocity, quality, and operational efficiency.
• Partner with Product and Design to balance innovation with execution.
• Collaborate with Operations, HR, and Finance for resource planning, budgeting, and vendor management.
  
  

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