Director of Engineering (AI Platform & Distributed Systems)

About the role

FactTrace is an early-stage deep-tech AI startup building a platform to detect, verify and analyse content authenticity. It is expanding its core engineering hub in Meknès and is looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the platform engineering organisation. The role bridges strategy and technical execution, leads teams of teams and manages managers while mentoring senior engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the engineering organisation, maintain roadmaps and communicate with the executive team so technical execution matches business objectives.
• Manage engineering managers, allocate tasks, review code and mentor junior and senior staff; drive engineering culture through objective setting, performance assessments and quarterly reviews.
• Own product delivery timelines and balance tech debt against delivery, optimising speed of delivery and iteration.
• Act as the ultimate technical authority for low-latency, event-driven pipelines that ingest millions of files reliably under strict SLAs (99.99%+ uptime).
• Oversee production AI and agentic runtimes, including enterprise-wide LLM workflows, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations and RAG knowledge bases.
• Define standards for automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Linux, Docker) and observability (Grafana, Prometheus).

Required profile

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years in a Director or Head of Engineering role managing senior engineers, managers and complex product delivery.
• Diplôme d'Ingénieur d'État in Computer Science or Software Engineering from EMI, or an equivalent elite state engineering school.
• Fluent English and a commitment to working full-time on-site at the Meknès tech hub.

Required skills

• Node.js / TypeScript and Python, with expert experience in REST APIs, WebSockets and event-driven microservices.
• LLM orchestration (Claude, OpenAI, local models), agentic runtimes and safety guardrails; MCP and advanced RAG are core requirements.
• PostgreSQL schema design, optimization and scaling, plus vector database architectures.
• Root-cause analysis, incident management and cloud scaling with Docker, Git, CI/CD, Grafana and Prometheus.

What we offer

• A critical leadership position in a highly ambitious AI startup.
• Competitive executive compensation package.
• The chance to work on major engineering and alignment challenges.
• A dynamic, highly skilled founding team environment.