Head of Engineering

Job title : Head of Engineering

The Role

• You will own the entire technology function at 247 Labs, reporting directly to the CEO. You'll lead our engineering organisation - backend, frontend, mobile, QA, and DevOps, through launch and into scale, and be accountable for the reliability, security, and performance of a 24/7 real-money platform handling live betting, payment processing, and social features for thousands of concurrent users.
• This is a hands-on leadership role at a decisive stage. You'll set technical direction, build and develop a high-performing team, and stay close enough to the code to make the hard architectural calls yourself. Your standards become the company's standards.

What You'll Do

• Own the technical roadmap and architecture across the platform: bet placement & settlement, wallet & payments, live sports data ingestion, communities, and social feed
• Lead, grow, and mentor the engineering team „ hiring, performance, and career development across backend, frontend, mobile, QA, and DevOps
• Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, testing, code review culture, CI/CD, and documentation
• Drive reliability and operational excellence „ SLOs, monitoring, alerting, on-call, and incident response for a 24/7 real-money platform
• Make build-vs-buy and vendor decisions, and own technical relationships with data, trading, payments, and fraud providers
• Own security, availability, and regulatory-facing technical compliance for a licensed gaming operator
• Partner with product, trading, and marketing leadership to translate business goals into delivery plans „ and hit launch dates
• Manage engineering budget, cloud spend (AWS/EKS), and tooling
• Stay hands-on where it matters: architecture reviews, critical design decisions, and unblocking the team in C# / .NET, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Kafka

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of engineering experience, including 4+ years leading engineering teams (Head of Engineering, Engineering Manager, or equivalent)
• Deep backend expertise „ C# / .NET strongly preferred, but we'll take a great leader from a JVM or Go background who can go deep in our stack
• Proven experience running production systems at scale: high availability, low latency, real-time workloads
• Hands-on background with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka (or equivalent), and cloud infrastructure „ AWS preferred; Kubernetes/EKS a strong plus
• Track record of hiring, mentoring, and retaining strong engineers „ and raising the bar for an entire organisation
• Experience owning delivery end to end: planning, prioritisation, and shipping on aggressive timelines without sacrificing quality
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including founders, regulators, and external partners
• Prior experience in betting, gaming, fintech, or high-transaction-volume platforms is a strong advantage

Nice to Have

• Experience taking a real-money or regulated platform from build to launch
• Familiarity with sportsbook integrations (odds feeds, managed trading services) and payment provider ecosystems
• Exposure to observability tooling „ Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent
• Experience with mobile release cycles (React Native) and BFF patterns for mobile and web
• Experience working across African markets, especially Nigeria