Head of Engineering, Emergence

Head of Engineering, R&D Center of Excellence (Egypt)

Cairo, Egypt | Remote within Egypt | Full-time, paid in USD | Reports to the co-founder and managing partner of Emergence

Who We Are

Emergence is a private equity firm backed by the Pritzker Organisation that acquires and scales category-defining B2B software companies. We own over 10 software businesses across three verticals today, healthcare, automotive, and infrastructure software, and we are actively adding to the portfolio. We combine operational rigor with patient capital: we buy good companies, then build the shared capabilities that make every company in the portfolio faster, healthier, and more valuable than it could be alone.

Engineering is the next of those shared capabilities. We are building an R&D Center of Excellence, headquartered in Cairo, that will set the engineering bar for the entire portfolio. This role leads it.

The Mission

You are the founding leader of Emergence’s R&D Center of Excellence. You will build and lead a team of top-tier engineers, based in Egypt, who are deployed into our portfolio companies to raise the level of engineering wherever they land. They are not an outsourced resource. They are Emergence engineers, part of the team at every company they serve, and you are the person who makes sure that is true.

The mandate is two-sided. You build the organization, and you build the engineering system behind it: the processes, infrastructure, and cross-cutting capabilities that let a lean team take an idea to production fast, at a quality level that holds, and then carry that same system into every company we own.

This is not a request to manage a team. It is a mandate to build an engineering organization across a portfolio of companies, with direct exposure to the CEOs, CTOs, and operating partners who run them. Very few engineering leaders get to say they have done that.

How It Works

• We want you to see the whole picture before you apply, so here is the structure you will be stepping into.

• The Center of Excellence sits at the center. It sources, vets, and sets a single quality bar for engineering talent across the portfolio, and it owns the deployment model: which engineers go where, for how long, and to what standard. You lead it.

• Engineers are organized by vertical. Each vertical (healthcare, automotive, infrastructure) has its own pod of engineers who build domain fluency together and can move between the companies in that vertical as needs change. Pods are led by you and your leads, staffed from Cairo, and integrated day to day into the squads at the companies they serve.

• Cross-cutting capabilities run across every vertical. Some competence does not belong to one industry: building AI agents and agentic workflows, data and analytics, automation, and the platform and infrastructure practices that make delivery fast and safe. You build these as portfolio-level capabilities, develop the engineers who carry them, and make them available to every company we own so that no OpCo has to solve the same problem twice.

• Engineers are forward deployed into companies we own. This is not a services or customer-facing model. An engineer works inside an Emergence portfolio company for a tour, embedded in that company’s squads, taking direction on priorities from that company’s technical leader. That leader sets the work and accepts the work. You own the engineer: their standards, their growth, their performance, and the decision about where they go next. We never place an engineer with a technical leader who does not want them. And because the engineers stay Emergence engineers, you live with the consequences of your placements and your standards across the whole portfolio, not just until a project closes.

• A biweekly forum closes the loop. Every two weeks, per vertical, you chair a sixty-minute forum with the portfolio companies’ technical leaders, the pod leads, and the Emergence operating partner for that vertical. Everyone hears the same feedback at the same time. Talent calibration, staffing changes, and unmet needs are decided in the room, and two weeks later the same room asks whether it moved. That cadence is what turns a dotted line into a real reporting relationship, and you own it.

• You also lead engineering at Emergence itself. Our central team builds the internal platforms and AI-driven tooling that Emergence uses across the portfolio. That team rolls up to you and is where new engineers are trained before they deploy. It is also your proving ground: the place you refine how we build before you carry it into the OpCos. You are the engineering counterpart to our head of product.

• It starts focused and grows. The first deployments are deliberate: a small number of engineers into a small number of companies, so the model is proven on results rather than promises. From there the plan is to scale. Emergence’s portfolio is growing, every company in it needs strong engineering, and the Center of Excellence is designed to grow into dozens of teams across the portfolio. You will be the one who built it from the first hire.

What You’ll Do

• Build the Center of Excellence from its first hires into a multi-vertical engineering organization, and be accountable for its results across the portfolio

• Own the quality bar. Define what a top-tier engineer looks like at Emergence, hold every hire and every deployed engineer to it, and act quickly when someone is not clearing it

• Own the caliber of every engineer who joins. Emergence builds and filters the candidate funnel for you, with dedicated recruiting resources behind it; your job is the judgment at the top of it, deciding who clears the bar and who does not, and scaling an organization of versatile, highly functional engineers from those decisions

• Lead the forward-deployment model: which engineers go where, for how long, and what they are accountable for while they are there

• Chair the biweekly vertical forums with portfolio technical leaders and operating partners, and drive the calibration, staffing, and follow-through decisions that come out of them

• Set portfolio-wide engineering standards for how software is built, tested, shipped, and observed, and coach deployed engineers to raise the practice of the teams around them without taking over those teams’ roadmaps

• Own the path from ideation to production. Continuously improve the process and infrastructure that let a lean team deliver high-quality output quickly, prove it on the central team, and translate it into the OpCos

• Build the cross-cutting capabilities the portfolio needs, including agent building, data and analytics, and automation, and decide when they belong inside engineering and when they should stand on their own

• Lead the central Emergence engineering team: architecture direction, technical review, and the internal AI-driven tooling the portfolio depends on

• Be Emergence’s leading voice on the AI landscape: where it is going, what it changes about how software gets built, and what that means for each of our companies. Establish how engineering teams here use AI well, with the guardrails that keep codebases maintainable as velocity increases

• Work directly with CEOs, CTOs, and operating partners across the portfolio to understand what each company needs from engineering and to translate that into staffing, capabilities, and standards

• Own the economics of the model together with the managing partner: what a deployed engineer costs, what they are worth to the company they serve, and how that scales

• Meet regularly with each portfolio company’s technical leader to review how deployed engineers are performing and what should change

What We’re Looking For

• A deep technical background built as a doer. You have spent many years designing, building, and operating production systems yourself and you are still credible in an architecture discussion with the strongest engineer in the room

• A track record of scaling all three: teams, systems, and architecture. You have grown an engineering organization from a small team to dozens of engineers, not just inherited one, and you have made the structural and technical decisions that let it keep working as it grew

• Experience leading multiple engineering teams at once, across more than one product, codebase, or company, and comfort operating where you influence teams you do not directly control

• A demonstrated high bar for talent. You have hired engineers who raised the level of the teams they joined, and you have made the hard calls when someone did not

• You have built the delivery machinery, not just used it. You have taken a team from slow and careful to fast and safe, and you can point to what changed in the process and the infrastructure to make that happen

• Fluency in modern engineering practice: how high-performing teams ship frequently and safely, how quality is built in rather than inspected in, and how to move a team from where it is to where it needs to be

• A real point of view on AI. You use it in your own engineering work today, you have a view on where the landscape is heading and what it changes about how software and teams get built, and you can separate what is durable from what is noise

• Breadth. You have worked across multiple languages, stacks, and cloud environments, and across more than one domain such as data, automation, or agentic systems. You are comfortable learning a new domain quickly. We hire for talent and judgment, not for a specific toolset

• Clear, confident English. You can explain a technical tradeoff to an investor in business terms and hold your ground in a design debate. Clarity of thinking matters; polish does not

• Based in Egypt, working an afternoon-to-evening Cairo schedule with heavy overlap into the US workday

• Environments you will touch include, but are not limited to:

  Languages: TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, C# and .NET, Java and Kotlin, Go, PHP, Dart, SQL

  Backend and frameworks: Node.js, NestJS, Express, ASP.NET Core, Django and FastAPI, Spring Boot, Laravel, GraphQL and REST APIs, microservices and event-driven architectures

  Frontend and mobile: React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, Flutter, React Native, native iOS and Android

  Data and AI: Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, data pipelines and warehousing, LLM integrations, RAG, agentic workflows, MCP, vector search, ML and analytics

  Cloud and infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, ECS and Cloud Run, serverless, Terraform and infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability and monitoring

  Domains: healthcare software with regulated data (HIPAA, PHI), automotive and marketplace platforms, infrastructure and network software, B2B SaaS at scale

  You will not be an expert in all of these. You will need to be able to assess engineering quality in any of them.

Who You Are

You came up building things and you never lost the instinct. You have led teams large enough to know that structure, standards, and hiring are what make an engineering organization scale, and you have the technical depth to know when a team is doing real engineering and when it is not. You are never finished improving how work gets done; the system you ran last year is not the one you would run today. You ask what the business needs before you propose the solution. You hold a high bar and you hold it kindly. You would rather leave a seat open than fill it with someone who lowers the level. You are humble about what you do not know, hungry to build something that has not existed before, and uncompromising about standards.

What We Offer

• Very competitive compensation, paid in USD

• The founding leadership seat of an engineering organization across a private equity portfolio, reporting directly to the firm’s co-founder and managing partner

• Direct working relationships with the CEOs, CTOs, and operating partners of over 10 software companies and counting

• A mandate that grows with the portfolio: this role is built to scale into dozens of teams

• A portfolio of real companies as the place to prove how modern software should be built, with the authority to carry what works from one company to the next

• Remote within Egypt, with the core team in Cairo

• A recruiting engine behind you. Sourcing, screening, and filtering are handled by Emergence, so your time goes to assessing talent and building the org, not filling a funnel

• Real ownership. You define the standards, the structure, and the team