Technical Engineering Lead

Technical Engineering Lead (Portugal) 

Location- Lisbon, Portugal 

ABOUT THE ROLE:

As Technical Engineering Lead, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for the Portugal-based R&D team and help establish the technical foundation for HiddenLayer’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance module. Your initial focus will be the GRC engine, a foundational platform capability that represents regulatory obligations as maintainable, machine-executable policy engines and guides customers through risk classification and conformity assessment.

This is a senior, high-ownership role for an engineer who can move between architecture, implementation, and technical direction. You will design the compliance rules engine, translate complex regulatory requirements into practical software models, build reliable cloud services, and set engineering standards that enable the team to scale. You will also mentor future hires and partner with product, security, and governance stakeholders to deliver a defensible, usable compliance experience.

WHO WE ARE:

HiddenLayer protects the world’s most valuable technologies from adversarial AI attacks. We were founded by AI professionals and security specialists with first-hand experience of how insidious adversarial AI attacks can be to detect and defend against. Determined to prove that these attacks were preventable, the team developed a unique, patent-pending, productized solution to support organizations in accelerating their adoption of AI securely. 

Our dedication to innovation has been recognized by prestigious awards such as RSA's Innovation Sandbox Winner, CB Insights AI 100, CyberTech 100, and SC's Most Promising Early-Stage Start-up.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Define the architecture for the EU AI Act Compliance Engine within HiddenLayer’s GRC module, including service boundaries, data models, APIs, workflow orchestration, and integration points.
• Design a regulation-as-data approach that represents EU AI Act obligations in a versioned, testable, explainable, and maintainable rules engine.
• Build automated obligation and risk-tier mapping for registered AI systems, including classifications such as prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk, and minimal-risk use cases.
• Create conformity-assessment workflows that guide governance teams through the obligations and evidence applicable to each AI system.
• Develop secure, reliable, observable cloud-native services using Python and appropriate supporting technologies.
• Establish engineering practices for testing, CI/CD, code review, documentation, observability, incident readiness, and secure SDLC execution.
• Validate the rules engine and risk-tiering logic against representative AI systems and real-world regulatory scenarios, improving accuracy and explainability over time.
• Partner with product, security, legal, governance, and engineering stakeholders to convert regulatory and customer needs into clear technical deliverables.
•  Make pragmatic architecture decisions in an evolving product environment, balancing correctness, extensibility, delivery speed, and operational risk.
•  Provide technical leadership and mentorship for subsequent hires, helping build a strong engineering culture and a scalable Portugal R&D function.

WHO YOU ARE:

• A senior software engineer or technical lead with 8+ years of experience delivering production systems and making architecture decisions across complex technical domains.
• An experienced Python and Golang engineer with strong foundations in cloud architecture, distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, and secure software development.
• Comfortable turning complex, evolving requirements into clear technical models, maintainable rules, and reliable workflows.
• Interested in the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, governance, risk, and regulation, with the judgment to distinguish policy intent from implementation detail.
• A hands-on leader who can write production code, review designs, troubleshoot difficult problems, and raise the engineering quality bar through example.
• A clear communicator who documents decisions, surfaces tradeoffs early, and builds alignment across engineering, product, security, and governance teams.
• A thoughtful mentor who enjoys helping other engineers grow and is motivated to shape the practices of a new R&D team.
• Based in Lisbon
• Professional fluency in English

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

•  Experience building compliance, governance, risk, audit, policy, workflow, or other rules-driven enterprise software.
• Working knowledge of the EU AI Act, AI governance, model risk management, conformity assessment, or related regulatory frameworks.
• Experience developing or operating machine-learning platforms, MLOps systems, AI infrastructure, or software adjacent to AI workflows.
• Experience building security products, cloud security tooling, GRC platforms, or integrations across security and enterprise ecosystems.
• Experience with AWS or Azure and containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with event-driven systems, workflow engines, policy-as-code, API gateways, service-oriented architectures, or distributed systems.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or Bicep.
• Familiarity with observability practices and tools for metrics, logs, traces, service health, and operational diagnostics.
• A master’s degree or equivalent advanced training in computer science, software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, or a related discipline.

WHY HIDDENLAYER?

We just raised $100M in Series B funding led by Delta-v Capital, with backing from Morgan Stanley, Microsoft's venture arm, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others. It's a validation of what we've built: 10x revenue growth, 50+ new enterprise customers, and deployments across defense, finance, and the world's largest AI platforms. This funding goes straight into expanding our platform and GTM capabilities, and into growing our team globally.

Attracting and retaining the very best people is our #1 priority. That’s why we offer our team best-in-class benefits, including:

• Fully Remote: We are a completely remote global team. Though we’re distributed, we are intentional about getting the team together. We offer a generous stipend for your home office setup, annual upgrades to ensure you have a comfortable workspace and a monthly stipend for internet/phone expenses. 
• Comprehensive Health & Wellness Benefits: Better than your average startup healthcare benefits. We also offer vision, dental, and 401k offerings.
• Flexible Time Off: Enjoy unlimited and flexible time off for all salaried employees, in addition to paid company holidays.
• Commitment to Learning and Development: We support personal growth and education through a dedicated L&D fund that can be used for training, conferences, certifications and industry events.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: We are committed to building a diverse team with individuals from various backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

To learn more about HiddenLayer visit HiddenLayer and follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.

HiddenLayer  is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, race, color, religion, national origin, age, marital status, political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, disability or protected veteran status. We are committed to providing a workplace free of any discrimination or harassment.