About this Engineering Site Lead, São Paulo role at Builders at Gigs
About Gigs
At Gigs, we're building the operating system for mobile services—a platform that lets tech companies embed global connectivity into their products effortlessly.
Just as Stripe lets any business add a payment button in seconds, Gigs empowers platforms to weave in connectivity—bridging the traditional world of telecom with modern tech. From fintechs launching mobile services to HR platforms offering work phone plans, we automate provisioning and remove telecom complexity.
Our team of around 150 people across the US and Europe, backed by nearly $100 million in funding from Ribbit Capital, Google, and Y Combinator. As one of the fastest-growing tech companies, bringing together early-stage engineers, product builders, and business athletes from companies like Stripe, Airbnb, and Shopify. We’re tackling deep technical and regulatory challenges to make connectivity truly seamless.
If you’re driven by curiosity, creativity, and the chance to shape the future of telecom, we’d love to hear from you.
Things We Care About
We are building in a highly complex space and tackling a massive problem. We want people who lean in when things get hard.
- Speed. We move and we ship. We set bold deadlines and treat every week like it matters.
- Ownership. If you see something broken, fix it. We don't wait for permission.
- Customer Obsession. Our customers' product is our product.
- Ambiguity. We're building frontier technology in a complex domain. You'll need sound judgement and good instincts to make decisions without complete information.
- First principles. We don't ask how things have been done before. We ask why they were done that way at all.
The Role
Gigs is on a mission to build the world's largest and first truly global telecom carrier. We are making the telecom stack fully and easily programmable, the way modern fintechs did for payments. Nobody else has abstracted the messy telecom legacy at this scale, which is one reason brands like Nubank, PicPay, Revolut, Cash App and others are already building on our platform.
Our engineering org is distributed across Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and New York. São Paulo is our newest hub, in a business critical market, and you will be its founding leader.
Your first mandate is continuity: you inherit our Network Integrations Americas team, today distributed across Europe, and bring its center of gravity to São Paulo without losing momentum on live, launch-critical work. You will line-manage the team, run a deliberate handover from the current European engineers, and build the local cohort that becomes the team's core.
From there, you partner with the VP of Engineering and other leaders to shape what the hub becomes: which domains land in São Paulo next, and how the site grows.
Why this role
This is a founding leadership seat with an existing, meaningful team underneath it. Not a greenfield gamble, and not a maintenance job. You get a real mandate from day one and the latitude to shape a hub from the ground up, at Head of Engineering seniority, reporting directly to the VP of Engineering. You start as the team's line leader, but you won't stay one unless you choose to: as the hub grows and you hire Engineering Managers, the shape of your own role is yours to define.
What you will do
- Take ownership of Network Integrations as its line leader, keeping delivery steady through the transition
- Run the Europe to São Paulo handover as an explicit workstream: context transfer, retention, and a clear timeline
- Hire and build the founding local team, including its Engineering Managers as the hub grows; you set the bar and the culture
- Establish the operating rhythm of the site and represent it inside a distributed org
- Understand and internalize the culture of Gigs as a global org, and make São Paulo part of it: one global Gigs, not a satellite
- Partner on hub strategy: sequencing, headcount, and the next domains to localize
- Be a full member of the engineering leadership team, shaping decisions well beyond the hub
- Shape an AI-first engineering culture from day one; engineers at Gigs ship with AI as a daily working practice
- Be a sparring partner in system design, domain modelling, team topologies, and org design
What we are looking for
- Engineering leadership at scale: you have led teams of teams or built one from a strong core, with the technical credibility to earn engineers' respect
- A builder's instinct: you have stood something up, not only run something stable. Founding a site, opening a market, or starting a function all count
- A product builder, not an empire builder: the hub grows because the product needs it, not because the org chart does
- A real network in the São Paulo engineering market, or a demonstrated ability to attract senior talent quickly
- Comfort operating in a distributed company across time zones, and the judgment to manage a sensitive team transition with care
- Strong delivery instincts: you catch risks before they become surprises and communicate bad news faster than anyone expects
- AI-forward: you use AI in your own workflow and actively shape how teams adopt it; this is a hard expectation, not a nice-to-have
- Native Portuguese, fluent English
Nice to have
- Background in telecom, connectivity, networking, or systems integration
- Experience in API-first or infrastructure/platform products
- Track record scaling an engineering org through a startup to scale-up transition
Work At Gigs
At Gigs, we value in-person collaboration. We believe the best ideas, decisions, and relationships are built when teams spend meaningful time together, and our culture is designed around that belief. We support flexibility where it makes sense. Some focused work can be done remotely, and not every role or week looks the same. You should expect regular time in one of our hubs, as well as occasional travel for team workshops, customer meetings, and Gigs Republic, our bi-annual company off-site. Our offices are designed to feel like home-inspired workspaces, with plants, thoughtful tools, and small, tight-knit teams that make collaboration feel natural, energizing, and effective.
What We Offer
At Gigs, we believe in rewarding excellence. We offer competitive compensation and stock options because we see you as a true partner in our growth. We also provide stipends for your home office or work setup, a budget for learning and development to fuel your career, and of course, a free phone and international data plan
Want to learn more about our benefits, hubs, and what it’s like to work at Gigs? Check out our Careers page.
