Head of Engineering
Want to lead engineering at a well-funded AI startup that's really going places? Scale a world-class team, ship AI products for real customers and revenue at 5D, and build the culture that carries us.
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About Us
Fifth Dimension is bringing vibe working to document-heavy industries. Today we work with real estate businesses in the US, EU and APAC, automating complex tasks, extracting valuable insights from documents, and empowering professionals to focus on high-impact work. Our AI workspace transforms how large investment managers and developers handle leases, development documents, and investment decisions.
We're a London, New York and Singapore based startup with an ample runway, backed by Tier 1 European and American investors. Our founders, Johnny Morris and Dr. Kate Jarvis bring a powerful blend of expertise: Johnny has 17+ years applying data and analytics to Real Estate, while Kate holds a Stanford PhD and 12 years of executive experience across Silicon Valley and London startups.
At Fifth Dimension, we're demanding yet encouraging, valuing experimentation and kind challenges. Our company values, Own It, Ship It, and Don't Be Boring, drive us to deliver exceptional results while fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
The Challenge
It's 9 AM on a Monday in London. You're reviewing the week's priorities across engineering, spotting a cross-team dependency that's about to stall a key feature launch—and you unblock it before it becomes a problem. Over lunch, you're in a 1:1 with a senior engineer who's ready for more ownership, sketching out a path for them to lead a new area. By Wednesday, you're on a call with the New York team, aligning on a customer delivery that spans time zones, then into a working session with the CTO and product leads pressure-testing the architecture for our next major initiative. By Thursday, you're reviewing a hiring pipeline for Singapore as we build out our APAC presence. By Friday, two new engineers have accepted offers, your team demo blew the founders away, and you're reflecting on how different this org looks from just three months ago.
This is what building looks like. Not just building software—building the engineering organisation that builds the software.
About You
You've scaled an engineering team before—around 10 to 100+ people in product engineering orgs—and you know how much has to go right simultaneously. Hiring great people, keeping them engaged and growing, knowing which practices to introduce at which stage, when to add structure and when to stay out of the way, and how to preserve the autonomy and intellectual honesty that make small teams great even as the organisation doubles and trebles in size.
You're technically credible without needing to be the best engineer in the room. You can engage substantively in architecture discussions, you earn the respect of senior ICs, and you know enough to ask the right questions and smell when something's off. But your superpower is people and delivery, not pull requests.
You understand that scaling an AI-first engineering organisation carries its own distinct challenges—especially right now. Coding agents and AI-assisted development workflows are evolving at breakneck speed. The tools your team uses today might look completely different in six months. This is the best time in a generation to drive transformational change in how software gets built, but it takes genuinely open-minded, AI-first leadership to make it happen. You don't just follow these developments—you have first-hand experience with what AI can do in software development, and you bring conviction about where it's heading.
You're comfortable with probabilistic outputs, evaluation-driven development, and the reality that traditional testing playbooks don't translate directly to AI products. You've seen what's possible when engineering teams embrace this shift, and you want to lead one that's at the frontier.
You write clearly and think in systems—both technical and organisational. You coach rather than command. You've had the difficult conversations, run the performance reviews, made the hard calls, and learned from the ones that didn't go well.
You're passionate about your own growth and create environments where others grow too. You seek feedback, iterate on your own approach, and genuinely believe that the best engineering cultures are built, not inherited.
Your Impact
Reporting to our CTO Chen, you'll take operational ownership of 5D's engineering organisation as we scale through Series A and beyond. You'll partner closely with our CTO on technical direction and architecture, and with our product and design colleagues on priorities and customer impact—owning the people, process, and delivery that turn strategy into shipped product.
You'll build the engineering culture that carries us from a tight-knit London team to a multi-geo organisation spanning London, New York, and Singapore.
This role is about operational leadership—not being the most senior technical decision-maker, and not coding day-to-day. It's about making everyone around you more effective, more aligned, and more ambitious.
What You'll Own
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Org design and scaling — Structure the team for growth, hire engineering leads, and build our presence in new geographies while preserving the autonomy that makes our best engineers thrive
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Delivery and process — Establish the coordination, rituals, and release practices that keep us shipping fast without sacrificing quality
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People and culture — Own career development, performance management, and the health of engineering culture as we grow
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Engineering operations — Be the operational backbone for compliance, security, and the day-to-day machinery that keeps the org running smoothly
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Leadership partnership — Free up CTO and CPO time by owning the operational load
