Head of Smart Solution Platform

MOV.AI | Full-Time | Tagus Park, Oeiras, Portugal (Hybrid – 3 days on-site)

About MOV.AI

MOV.AI is a robotics software company building an intelligent software platform for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and intralogistics operations. The Smart Solution Platform, including the Meta Planner, connects business demand with planning, orchestration, fleet operations, execution visibility, analytics, and integration into customer environments.

Role Summary (Executive Overview)

We are looking for a Head of Smart Solution Platform to lead and develop the engineering organization responsible for the Meta Planner and the software capabilities that turn logistics requirements into intelligent, executable AMR operations.

This role combines:

• Leadership and development of the Smart Solution Platform engineering organization, including Backend and Frontend Engineering
• Ownership of the technical direction and solution architecture of the Meta Planner backend and application platform
• Distributed systems, scalable backend services, relational data architectures, and performance-critical software
• Technical strategy, product planning, delivery ownership, and organizational development
• Close collaboration with Product Management, Customer Success, Robotics, QA, Platform Engineering, and Management, with a particularly strong working relationship with the Head of Robotics
• Translation of customer and business needs into a coherent platform roadmap and reliable product delivery

Important:
This is not a traditional people-management role and not a pure Backend Tech Lead role. The position owns a product and engineering domain, develops the organization, and remains sufficiently close to architecture and implementation to provide credible technical direction.

What We Really Need (Core Candidate DNA)
The ideal candidate brings four key dimensions:

1. Engineering Leader with Strong Technical Authority
• Leads, mentors, and develops engineers and team leads through clear expectations, trust, and accountability
• Can assess organizational capability, identify skill gaps, hire effectively, and create sustainable team structures
• Builds an environment in which engineers take ownership while maintaining high technical standards
• Is credible in architecture and implementation discussions and can intervene in difficult engineering problems when needed

2. Smart Platform & Distributed Systems Thinker
• Thinks in business domains, business capabilities, bounded responsibilities, services, events, data flows, and runtime behavior rather than isolated features or technical layers
• Understands the different requirements of real-time operational data, transactional data, configuration data, analytical data, and auditable history
• Understands how to design clear synchronous and asynchronous interfaces, including APIs, events, schemas, data contracts, compatibility rules, and failure behavior
• Can translate the agreed business domain model into a modular software architecture with explicit ownership, stable boundaries, and independently evolvable components
• Understands distributed systems, asynchronous I/O, event-driven architectures, concurrency, fault tolerance, and unreliable networks
• Can shape systems that remain robust across cloud, on-premises, edge, and customer environments
• Balances performance, scalability, maintainability, upgradeability, and operational reliability concepts

3. Product and Customer-Oriented Technology Leader
• Understands logistics orchestration, transport orders, planning, resource allocation, execution management, fleet operations, and analytics as one coherent product journey
• Translates customer and business needs into technical strategy, priorities, and realistic delivery plans
• Challenges requirements constructively and makes technical trade-offs transparent
• Keeps the platform configurable and extensible without allowing customer-specific logic to compromise the core product

4. Delivery Owner
• Defines technical priorities and turns strategic initiatives into milestones, estimates, dependencies, and resource needs
• Maintains clear visibility into delivery status, risks, architectural debt, and capacity constraints
• Balances MVP delivery with deliberate investment in scalability, maintainability, and future evolution
• Takes accountability for engineering outcomes rather than only coordinating activities

Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own and evolve the technical architecture of the Meta Planner backend and application platform
• Define architectural principles, engineering standards, business-domain and service boundaries, APIs, events, runtime models, and data responsibilities for the Smart Solution Platform
• Define and govern explicit interfaces between modules and domains, including API contracts, event semantics, schema ownership, versioning, compatibility, error handling, and observability expectations
• Translate the business domain model into a coherent modular architecture that preserves clear separation of responsibilities across Order Management, Planning and Decision capabilities, Execution Management, Resource Orchestration, fleet integration, analytics, and customer solution layers
• Design and review scalable, reliable, high-performance distributed systems
• Guide decisions concerning concurrency, asynchronous processing, networking, retries, recovery, fault handling, and graceful degradation
• Ensure reliable operation across unreliable networks and heterogeneous customer environments
• Ensure that modularity and interface discipline support independent evolution, testability, deployability, and controlled integration across cloud, on-premises, edge, and robotics environments
• Lead the design of extensible runtime abstractions that support configurable and low-code behavior without repeated changes to the platform core
• Own the overall data management principles and guide relational data architecture, schema evolution, consistency, migrations, upgradeability, and analytical access
• Establish clear data ownership and lifecycle rules, including source of truth, retention, traceability, lineage, access control, and separation of operational workloads from analytical workloads
• Ensure fit-for-purpose handling of real-time and operational state, transactional records, configuration and parameter data, historical events, analytics datasets, reporting structures, and audit trails
• Review and guide Rust and Python architecture, especially for concurrent and performance-critical services
• Align solution architecture with the Principal Architect and shared platform standards

Engineering Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Smart Solution Platform engineering teams, including the Frontend Team through its dedicated Team Leader
• Develop and allocate cross-functional expertise in Frontend Engineering, Optimization, and Data Management to support both Smart Solution Platform and agreed Robotics priorities
• Define team structure, responsibilities, ownership, interfaces, and reporting relationships as the area grows
• Coaching and developing the team in day-to-day operations
• Set expectations for engineering quality, accountability, collaboration, and delivery
• Conduct performance evaluations and provide regular feedback and coaching
• Lead recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, succession, and capability development

Planning & Delivery
• Define technical strategy and priorities with Product Management and Director R&D
• Create realistic engineering roadmaps, ballpark estimates, staffing assumptions, and delivery milestones
• Allocate work based on priorities, capability, dependencies, and delivery commitments
• Manage technical risks, architectural dependencies, domain boundaries, interface contracts, data dependencies, and cross-team integration points
• Prevent short-term delivery decisions and customer-specific adaptations from eroding modularity, maintainability, upgradeability, or the integrity of the core product
• Ensure that quality, security, observability, testing, documentation, and upgradeability are part of normal delivery
• Balance near-term customer commitments with long-term platform evolution

Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Work with Product Management to shape the Meta Planner roadmap and product boundaries
• Collaborate with Customer Success to understand deployments, operational issues, and recurring customer needs
• Maintain close and continuous alignment with the Head of Robotics on platform-to-robot integration, shared technical capabilities, priorities, capacity, interfaces, and delivery dependencies
• Ensure that Frontend, Optimization, and Data Management expertise can be contributed effectively to Robotics initiatives while preserving clear ownership and accountability
• Work with Platform Engineering / DevOps on deployment, infrastructure, observability, security, and release capabilities
• Work with QA leadership to establish end-to-end quality, release confidence, and product readiness
• Communicate technical direction, risks, trade-offs, investments, and delivery status clearly to Management

Must-Have Skills (Non-Negotiable)

Architecture & Distributed Systems

• Strong practical experience designing distributed, service-oriented, and event-driven systems
• Deep understanding of concurrency, asynchronous I/O, synchronization, networking, fault tolerance, and recovery
• Ability to define clear business-domain, service, module, API, event, and data ownership boundaries
• Experience defining stable, versioned interfaces and contracts for distributed systems, including failure semantics and backward compatibility
• Strong understanding of domain-oriented modular architecture and the distinction between business domains, technical components, and organizational ownership
• Experience designing systems for long-term evolution, maintainability, and upgradeability
• Ability to review architecture at both conceptual and implementation level
• Work with Product Management to shape the Meta Planner roadmap and product boundaries
• Collaborate with Customer Success to understand deployments, operational issues, and recurring customer needs
• Maintain close and continuous alignment with the Head of Robotics on platform-to-robot integration, shared technical capabilities, priorities, capacity, interfaces, and delivery dependencies
• Ensure that Frontend, Optimization, and Data Management expertise can be contributed effectively to Robotics initiatives while preserving clear ownership and accountability
• Work with Platform Engineering / DevOps on deployment, infrastructure, observability, security, and release capabilities
• Work with QA leadership to establish end-to-end quality, release confidence, and product readiness
• Communicate technical direction, risks, trade-offs, investments, and delivery status clearly to Management

Backend, Runtime & Data

• Strong backend or systems programming background
• Experience with Rust codebases is highly desirable; Python expertise is relevant
• Experience with performance-critical and concurrent software
• Strong understanding of relational database architecture, transactions, consistency, indexing, migrations, schema evolution, and data ownership
• Understanding of event histories, auditability, traceability, data retention, analytical read models, and separation of operational and analytical workloads
• Ability to define a coherent data strategy across real-time and operational data, transactional data, configuration and parameter data, analytics and reporting, and auditing
• Understanding of runtime models, configuration-driven behavior, and extensible platform abstractions
• Cloud-native and containerized software development experience, including Docker and Kubernetes

Leadership & Execution

• Experience leading and developing software engineers and technical leads
• Experience translating strategy into roadmaps, priorities, estimates, staffing needs, and delivery commitments
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Strong ownership, prioritization, decision-making, and accountability

Nice-to-Have (Strong Differentiators)

• Experience with fleet management, logistics orchestration, warehouse automation, WES/WCS, or industrial software
• Understanding of AMRs, ROS, VDA 5050, robotics integration, or systems operating under physical constraints
• Experience with optimization, scheduling, resource orchestration, digital twins, simulation, or operational analytics
• Experience building configurable platforms, low-code runtimes, workflow systems, or customer solution layers
• Experience with multi-tenant, multi-site, cloud and on-premises product deployments
• Experience scaling an engineering organization through significant growth
• Cybersecurity and regulatory awareness, including secure development, vulnerability management, CRA, or NIS2-related practices

What the Candidate Will Actually Do

• Build and develop the Smart Solution Platform engineering organization, including Backend, Frontend, Optimization, and Data Management capabilities
• Establish an effective cross-functional service and collaboration model for expertise provided to the Robotics organization
• Ensure alignment between frontend delivery, product workflows, platform architecture, and Robotics needs
• Own the technical direction and solution architecture of the Meta Planner
• Turn the agreed business domain model into an executable, modular, scalable, and independently evolvable software platform
• Create a sustainable data foundation that serves real-time control, transactional processing, platform parametrization, analytics, reporting, and audit requirements
• Establish and enforce clear module, service, API, event, and data contracts so that teams can develop and integrate capabilities without creating hidden coupling
• Drive delivery across order management, planning, orchestration, fleet integration, observability, analytics, and customer configuration
• Establish clear boundaries and defined interfaces between business domains, core product capabilities, shared platform services, robotics integration, and customer-specific solution layers
• Guide difficult design and implementation decisions in Rust, Python, distributed services, databases, and runtime models
• Create realistic plans and maintain transparency on delivery, risks, dependencies, and resource needs
• Raise engineering quality, testing, security, maintainability, and operational readiness
• Partner with Product, Customer Success, Robotics, Platform Engineering, QA, and Management

Dealbreakers

• No people leadership and team-development experience
• No distributed systems or software architecture depth
• No evidence of owning delivery outcomes and technical strategy
• No experience with scalable backend platforms and relational data architectures
• Pure management profile without technical credibility
• Pure architect profile without organizational leadership and execution accountability
• Inability to balance customer commitments, product needs, engineering quality, and long-term architecture
• Preference for coordination over ownership and decision-making

Position Framework

Reporting Line

• Reports to the Director R&D
• Leads the Smart Solution Platform engineering organization, including Backend Engineering and the Frontend Team, which is organized through a dedicated Frontend Team Leader
• Coordinates shared priorities and resource commitments closely with the Head of Robotics while maintaining clear people leadership and capability ownership
• Works as a peer to the Head of Robotics and collaborates closely with the Platform Engineering Lead / Principal Architect and QA leadership
• Partners with Product Management and Customer Success on roadmap, priorities, customer outcomes, and delivery expectations

Compensation

• 70.000 € – 85.000 € gross annual salary (14 salaries)

Work Arrangements

• This position requires regular on-site presence at the Company's office for a minimum of three (3) working days per week.
• The remaining working days may be performed remotely, subject to business requirements and the Company's hybrid working policy.