[Hiring] Technical Engineering Lead @HiddenLayer

Role Description

As Technical Engineering Lead, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for the Portugal-based R&D team and help establish the technical foundation for HiddenLayer’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance module. Your initial focus will be the GRC engine, a foundational platform capability that represents regulatory obligations as maintainable, machine-executable policy engines and guides customers through risk classification and conformity assessment.

This is a senior, high-ownership role for an engineer who can move between architecture, implementation, and technical direction.

You will:

• Define the architecture for the EU AI Act Compliance Engine within HiddenLayer’s GRC module, including service boundaries, data models, APIs, workflow orchestration, and integration points.
• Design a regulation-as-data approach that represents EU AI Act obligations in a versioned, testable, explainable, and maintainable rules engine.
• Build automated obligation and risk-tier mapping for registered AI systems, including classifications such as prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk, and minimal-risk use cases.
• Create conformity-assessment workflows that guide governance teams through the obligations and evidence applicable to each AI system.
• Develop secure, reliable, observable cloud-native services using Python and appropriate supporting technologies.
• Establish engineering practices for testing, CI/CD, code review, documentation, observability, incident readiness, and secure SDLC execution.
• Validate the rules engine and risk-tiering logic against representative AI systems and real-world regulatory scenarios, improving accuracy and explainability over time.
• Partner with product, security, legal, governance, and engineering stakeholders to convert regulatory and customer needs into clear technical deliverables.
• Make pragmatic architecture decisions in an evolving product environment, balancing correctness, extensibility, delivery speed, and operational risk.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship for subsequent hires, helping build a strong engineering culture and a scalable Portugal R&D function.

Qualifications

• A senior software engineer or technical lead with 8+ years of experience delivering production systems and making architecture decisions across complex technical domains.
• An experienced Python and Golang engineer with strong foundations in cloud architecture, distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, and secure software development.
• Comfortable turning complex, evolving requirements into clear technical models, maintainable rules, and reliable workflows.
• Interested in the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, governance, risk, and regulation, with the judgment to distinguish policy intent from implementation detail.
• A hands-on leader who can write production code, review designs, troubleshoot difficult problems, and raise the engineering quality bar through example.
• A clear communicator who documents decisions, surfaces tradeoffs early, and builds alignment across engineering, product, security, and governance teams.
• A thoughtful mentor who enjoys helping other engineers grow and is motivated to shape the practices of a new R&D team.
• Based in Lisbon.
• Professional fluency in English.

Requirements

• Experience building compliance, governance, risk, audit, policy, workflow, or other rules-driven enterprise software.
• Working knowledge of the EU AI Act, AI governance, model risk management, conformity assessment, or related regulatory frameworks.
• Experience developing or operating machine-learning platforms, MLOps systems, AI infrastructure, or software adjacent to AI workflows.
• Experience building security products, cloud security tooling, GRC platforms, or integrations across security and enterprise ecosystems.
• Experience with AWS or Azure and containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with event-driven systems, workflow engines, policy-as-code, API gateways, service-oriented architectures, or distributed systems.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or Bicep.
• Familiarity with observability practices and tools for metrics, logs, traces, service health, and operational diagnostics.
• A master’s degree or equivalent advanced training in computer science, software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, or a related discipline.

Benefits

• Fully Remote: We are a completely remote global team with a generous stipend for home office setup, annual upgrades, and a monthly stipend for internet/phone expenses.
• Comprehensive Health & Wellness Benefits: Better than your average startup healthcare benefits, including vision, dental, and 401k offerings.
• Flexible Time Off: Unlimited and flexible time off for all salaried employees, in addition to paid company holidays.
• Commitment to Learning and Development: Support for personal growth and education through a dedicated L&D fund for training, conferences, certifications, and industry events.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Commitment to building a diverse team and providing a workplace free of discrimination or harassment.