Head of Software

📍 Greater Paris | 💰 €120,000–€140,000 | Relocation support available + Equity

English as the working language. A small, close-knit engineering team where ownership is real.

A deep-tech startup near Paris is building genuinely novel hardware from a blank sheet, and the software behind it is at the same stage: proven, but early. Safety-critical embedded code, hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure, telemetry, and the simulation framework that validates everything before it ships. It needs to go from prototype to production-grade, and it needs someone to own that whole picture.

What the role actually is:

→ You report directly to the VP of Engineering and stay close to the code

→ You set the architecture across embedded systems, test infrastructure, data pipelines, and simulation

→ You're the final technical authority on what ships

→ You build and grow a small software team as it scales

What matters most isn't a specific industry background. It's having done something genuinely hard and seen it through: critical infrastructure, maritime systems, drones, real-time systems, high-frequency trading, or anything else where the margin for error was thin and you shipped anyway.

What matters:

→ 8+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years leading engineers, whether as a tech lead, manager, or head of a small team

→ Deep systems programming in a performance-critical language (C, C++, Rust, or equivalent), shipped on real physical hardware

→ At least one full development cycle taken end to end, blank sheet through to production-grade

→ A track record of raising engineering standards in a small team while still moving fast

→ Genuinely comfortable with radical ownership, not just the idea of it

Nice to have, not required:

→ Embedded flight or navigation software experience

→ Rust in embedded systems or simulation and tooling

→ Dynamics or physical systems simulation

→ Telemetry at scale: time-series databases, data pipelines, dashboards

→ Real-time engine or rendering experience from video-game development