Head of Engineering
Bangsar South, W.P. Kuala Lumpur
|Hybrid
|Direct hire
|Job ID 7995|Posted Dec 7, 2025JOB DESCRIPTION
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
1. Strategy & Technical Leadership
Experience & Background:
Technical Expertise:
Our primary stack includes:
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:
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
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.
- 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
Horizontal is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.
We seek to provide employment opportunities to talented, qualified candidates regardless of race, color, sex/gender including gender identity and/or expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under federal, state or local law.
In addition, Horizontal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you need to request a reasonable accommodation in order to complete the application or interview process, please contact us.
All applicants applying must be legally authorized to work in the country of employment.