Head of Technology (Engineering, Platform & Living Systems)

Company Description

Our Client is a real estate developer building AI-native, agentic homes and workplaces from the ground up, not retrofitted with gadgets. Their spaces use an intelligent agent that perceives the environment, learns its occupants, and adjusts light, air, water, sleep and surroundings toward wellness and longevity. Our Client runs a lab and experience centre, works with best-in-class technology partners, and has a pipeline of thousands of units to deploy into. Our Client is a fast-moving, founder-led organisation where technology, design and construction teams work closely together.

Job Description

Role Overview
We are seeking a hands-on, systems-minded Head of Technology to own everything that makes our client’s spaces actually work. The client is building AI-native, agentic homes and workplaces: buildings where an intelligent agent perceives the space, learns its occupants, and continuously adjusts light, air, water, sleep and environment toward wellness and longevity.

Reporting to the Chief AI Officer (CAIO), you will be the CPU of the technology organisation. You will own the engineering teams, the platform architecture, the hardware integration layer and the reliability of every system deployed, from the experimental lab to fully occupied residential towers. The CAIO sets the vision; the Head of Product, UX & Design defines what is built; you ensure it is built well, runs reliably, and scales.

This is not a slideware role. You will be expected to read code, review architecture, and stand in a half-wired lab at 10pm and know why the lights aren’t responding.

Reporting & Team
Reports to: Chief AI Officer (CAIO)

Key partners: Head of Product, UX & Design (product owners and roadmap); Technical Program Manager (delivery cadence); Development & Construction teams (building integration)

Leads:

• Agentic Intelligence Engineering: Senior AI Systems Engineer, Backend AI Engineers, AI Systems Engineers, AI Data Analyst
• App & Platform Engineering: Mobile Engineers, Frontend Engineers, Backend & Dashboards Engineers
• Hardware & IoT: Smart Home & Automation Engineers, Smart Home Hardware & Operations, IoT & Wearables Engineer, Experience Centre Manager
• Delivery Reliability: Quality Engineer, Deployment Engineer / Network Admin, IT Manager
• Research & Development: Wellness & Longevity Specialist, Robotics Engineers, R&D AI Systems Engineer
Key Responsibilities

1. Platform Architecture & Technical Direction

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the platform: device integration (Home Assistant over KNX, Zigbee, Matter/Thread and vendor ecosystems), the MQTT event bus, the data lake, the Perception backend server, and the agentic layer.
• Make the architecture reusable by design: the same core must power the Work product (offices, meeting rooms, desk pods) and the Home product (apartment-by-apartment deployments), and later hospitality.
• Define the local-first vs. cloud model: fast, deterministic local control for everyday actions, with frontier models (Claude, OpenAI, etc.) reserved for heavier reasoning, while respecting PII and UAE data regulations.
• Lead build-vs-buy decisions. We integrate best-in-class partners (sleep tech, wearables, lighting) rather than reinventing them, and build only where it creates a durable advantage.2. Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Build, hire and lead the engineering teams across AI, app/platform, hardware and reliability, with a bias for senior, high-ownership engineers who want to work at the frontier.
• Partner with the product owners (who report to the Head of Product, UX & Design) so that every product line has a clear owner for what and a clear engineering lead for how.
• Set engineering standards: code review, CI/CD, environments, documentation, and a predictable sprint cadence alongside the Technical Program Manager.
• Translate the CAIO’s vision and product roadmaps into realistic technical plans, timelines and staffing.3. Living Systems, Hardware & the Lab

• Own the physical technology layer: lighting, sensors, switches, smart mirrors, speakers, cameras, wearables integration, and future robotics.
• Stand up and run the lab and Experience Centre spaces. Get real switches, lights, pressure sensors and beds wired so that software teams can build against real hardware.
• Drive hardware RFPs and vendor selection (e.g. Signify and other lighting/controls partners) together with procurement, and secure the technical side of exclusive partnerships.
• Build digital twin simulators so that software can be developed and tested before physical spaces (e.g. a gym, spa or full apartment) exist.4. Reliability, Security & Privacy

• Own uptime and quality for every deployed space. A building of hundreds of units needs automated monitoring, telemetry, alerting and self-healing, not people on call at 2am.
• Establish QA practices for hardware/software integration: functional, regression, stress and chaos testing.
• Lead the privacy-first technical design for biometric and occupant data, including the early privacy impact assessment, consent and per-person data separation within a household.
• Guarantee graceful degradation: every space must keep working manually (physical switches, safe defaults, emergency override) during Wi-Fi, cloud or AI outages.
• Define and maintain the AI safety guardrails and kill-switch design.5. Research & Development

• Oversee R&D into wellness and longevity technology, robotics and new sensing modalities, turning promising experiments into production-ready capabilities.
• Maintain a technology radar so the client stays ahead of what Apple Home, Alexa, Samsung and other developers are shipping.

Requirements

Technical & Leadership Requirements

• Architecture: Distributed/event-driven systems, edge + cloud hybrid design, data platforms, API and integration design
• AI & Agents: Practical experience shipping LLM-based or agentic systems; RAG, tool use, local model deployment, evaluation and guardrails
• IoT & Smart Buildings: Home Assistant, MQTT, KNX, Zigbee, Matter/Thread, BMS integration, network design for dense multi-unit buildings
• App & Platform: Mobile (Flutter or native), PWA/web, backend services, dashboards; containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes)
• Reliability: Observability, telemetry, incident management, QA automation, SRE practices
• Security & Privacy: Privacy by design, biometric/health data handling, regional data regulation (UAE PDPL or GDPR equivalent)
• Leadership: Built and led multi-disciplinary engineering teams (software + hardware) of 15+; strong hiring track record; comfortable in a fast-moving, founder-led environmentPreferred Qualifications

• Hardware + Software Track Record: You have shipped products where software meets the physical world: smart home, IoT, consumer electronics, robotics, wearables or building technology.
• Health/Wellness Tech Exposure: Experience at, or integrating with, companies such as Whoop, Oura, Ultrahuman, Eight Sleep or similar is a strong plus.
• Scale Experience: You have taken a system from prototype to many deployed sites or thousands of devices, and lived through what breaks.
• Hands-On Credibility: You still prototype, review pull requests and can debug a misbehaving device.
• Pragmatic Judgement: You know when to integrate a partner, when to build, and when “good enough this week” beats “perfect next quarter”.

Why This Role?

Real estate has barely changed in decades, while the device on your wrist has become smarter than your home. Our client is closing that gap, building homes and workplaces that are AI-native from the ground up rather than retrofitted with gadgets. As Head of Technology you will build the engine behind that vision, with real buildings, real residents and a pipeline of thousands of units to deploy into. Few roles anywhere let you shape agentic AI, IoT and wellness technology at the scale of entire buildings.

Additional Suggestions for the Candidate

• Show Us Something Physical: We love candidates who can walk us through a system they built that controls real-world hardware, including what went wrong.
• Reliability Is a Feature: Come ready to talk about how you would keep hundreds of apartments running when a light bulb, a router or a cloud model fails.
• Builder’s Mindset: We are looking for someone who says “I’ll get it working” rather than “that’s not my department.”

• Offered Salary: Competitive, in line with market standards for the role and seniority, along with additional benefits as per the company’s band structure.