Vice President of Engineering

WasteHero is building the digital infrastructure powering municipal waste management across the Nordics and the Middle East.

Our cloud-native SaaS platform enables cities and operators to optimize routes, automate billing, ensure regulatory compliance, and operate more sustainably.

We are a mission-driven scale-up with strong product-market fit, institutional backing, and long-term public contracts serving millions of citizens. Product and engineering sit at the core of the company — from our headquarters in Aarhus.

The Role

We are looking for a VP / Head of Engineering to own engineering execution and people leadership across our distributed engineering organisation.

This is the most critical leadership hire we are making this year.

You will be responsible for the performance, growth, and delivery of our entire engineering team — spanning Nordics and Middle East. You will work alongside our Principal Engineer (architecture authority), Head of Product (product strategy), and Head of AI Engineering (AI-accelerated development) to ship mission-critical software for Nordic municipalities and Middle Eastern operators.

You are not here to write code. You are here to build the organisation that writes great code — fast, reliably, and at scale.

What You Will Do

People & Organisation

* Lead and develop ~40 engineers across distributed locations , including backend, frontend, fullstack, mobile, DevOps, and QA

* Run 1:1s, performance management, career development, and hiring across all engineering functions

* Build a leadership layer beneath you — develop team leads and senior engineers into managers

* Create the environment where senior engineers want to stay and junior engineers grow fast

* Own engineering culture: trust, accountability, transparency, and speed

Delivery & Execution

* Own engineering delivery across all active projects — Nordic municipal contracts, Middle East deployments, and platform evolution

* Establish predictable delivery cadence with clear sprint planning, capacity management, and cross-team coordination

* Remove blockers, manage dependencies, and ensure product requirements flow cleanly into engineering execution

* Bridge the gap between Product (what to build) and Engineering (how and when it ships)

Process & Scale

* Introduce engineering processes that scale — without killing speed. Think lightweight governance, not bureaucracy

* Define and track engineering KPIs: velocity, quality, cycle time, deployment frequency

* Standardise how distributed teams collaborate: async communication, documentation, code review, and incident management

* Own the relationship between Aarhus HQ and the Cairo Engineering Hub — make it feel like one team, not two offices

Technical Partnership

* Partner with the Principal Engineer on architecture decisions and technical strategy — you don't need to be the smartest architect in the room, but you need to understand the trade-offs

* Collaborate with Head of AI Engineering to integrate AI-accelerated development workflows into engineering operations

* Ensure engineering standards, code quality, and operational excellence across the platform

The Profile

Must Have

* 5+ years leading engineering teams of 15+ people across multiple locations and time zones

* Proven track record of building engineering organisations — hiring, developing, and retaining talent

* Experience managing distributed teams with a mix of seniority levels (senior, mid, junior)

* Background in B2B SaaS, ideally with multi-tenant cloud-native platforms

* Strong delivery management skills — you know how to ship complex software on time

* Experience with platform transitions, migrations, or product consolidations (we are migrating from 1.0 monolith to 2.0 microservices)

* Fluent English. Danish is a strong plus but not required

Nice to Have

* Experience with Python-based backend systems (Django, FastAPI)

* Background in public-sector software, regulated industries, or municipal/infrastructure platforms

* Experience scaling engineering teams in Egypt, Eastern Europe, or the Nordics

* Familiarity with event-driven architectures, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices

* Previous CTO or VP Engineering role at a scale-up (Series A–C stage)

What Makes You Successful Here

* You build teams that don't depend on you — autonomous, accountable, and fast

* You create clarity in chaos — when priorities compete and deadlines collide, you make the call

* You care about engineers as people, not just resources

* You balance process with pragmatism — enough structure to scale, not enough to slow down

* You earn trust from both the CEO and the most junior developer

* You have done this before in a company that was growing fast and breaking things along the way

Why Join WasteHero

* The challenge: Build the engineering organisation behind one of the largest municipal digitalisation projects in Europe

* The impact: Your team's code runs waste collection for millions of citizens across the Nordics

* The ownership: Direct report to the CEO. Full mandate over engineering people, process, and delivery

* The team: Work alongside a Principal Engineer, Head of Product, and Head of AI Engineering — a leadership team being built for scale

* The timing: Pre-Series A with strong revenue, institutional backing, and a clear path to €10M+ ARR. Early enough to shape everything, late enough that the product works

* The mission: Real-world environmental impact — cleaner cities, smarter operations, less waste

Competitive salary + equity (warrants). Relocation support available.

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