Head of Engineering — sanctions.io Spain · Tenerife preferred · Remote (CET) considered We're entering a new phase of growth at sanctions.io, and we need a Head of Engineering to lead it. Our platform powers sanctions screening and AML compliance for hundreds of financial institutions worldwide. Our current strength is stability and reliability. What we need now is someone who pairs that with curiosity, momentum, and the ability to move fast on new ideas — without sacrificing quality. This is a senior leadership role with two dimensions: you manage the team, and you push the technical frontier. Team Leadership · Manage and grow our 4-person R&D engineering team — performance, mentorship, 1:1s, hiring · Create an environment where engineers are unblocked, motivated, and growing · Run sprint planning, prioritisation, and delivery in close collaboration with product · Be the first point of contact for the team — reduce noise upward, not add to it · Build a culture that is pragmatic, quality-conscious, curious, and fast AI & Technical Strategy · Lead AI integration initiatives — from developer tooling to product-facing features (AI-assisted screening, LLM-powered adverse media analysis, false positive reduction) · Own the technical roadmap and architecture evolution of the platform · Evaluate and introduce new technologies thoughtfully — you're genuinely excited by what's emerging · Write RFCs and architecture decision records (ADRs) ⚙️ Platform Ownership · Drive code quality, testing culture, and engineering standards across our Django / Elasticsearch / PostgreSQL / Celery stack · Ensure API reliability, versioning discipline, and backward compatibility · Collaborate with DevOps on infrastructure decisions and deployment strategy · Own production reliability: incident response, postmortems, observability ✅ What we're looking for · 7+ years backend engineering, majority in Python / Django · 2+ years managing engineering teams — actual people management, not just tech lead · Genuine hands-on curiosity about AI/ML — you've shipped something with LLMs or embeddings, or you're actively doing so · Strong grasp of modern system architecture: APIs, async workers, search, cloud infra · Track record of shipping: technical excellence balanced with pragmatic delivery · Spanish C1+ and excellent English — both are required · Based in Spain or willing to relocate; Tenerife preferred ➕ Strong plus · Experience in fintech, compliance, or data-intensive SaaS · Elasticsearch at production scale · Familiarity with RAG pipelines, vector search, or document classification · Experience scaling a small engineering team through a growth phase Our stack Django · DRF · PostgreSQL · Elasticsearch · Celery · Redis · SQS · Docker · AWS · Terraform · GitHub Actions · Prometheus · Sentry About sanctions.io We provide API and portal services for sanctions screening, PEP data, and adverse media monitoring — used by ~300 customers in the financial compliance space. Small team, real ownership, meaningful product. Team language: Spanish Product and customers: English HQ: Tenerife, Spain Interested? Apply here or send a message directly. We read every application.