Head of Engineering, Emergence

About this role

Head of Engineering, Emergence (Egypt)

Cairo, Egypt | Remote within Egypt | Full-time, paid in USD | Reports to the co-founder and managing partner of Emergence

Who We Are

Emergence is a private equity firm backed by the Pritzker Organisation that acquires and scales category-defining B2B software companies. We own over 10 software businesses across three verticals today, healthcare, automotive, and infrastructure software, and we are actively adding to the portfolio. We combine operational rigor with patient capital: we buy good companies, then build the shared capabilities that make every company in the portfolio faster, healthier, and more valuable than it could be alone.

Engineering is the next of those shared capabilities. We are building an R&D Center of Excellence, headquartered in Cairo, that will set the engineering bar for the entire portfolio. This role leads it.

The Mission

You are the founding leader of Emergence’s R&D Center of Excellence. You will build and lead a team of top-tier engineers, based in Egypt, who are deployed into our portfolio companies to raise the level of engineering wherever they land. They are not an outsourced resource. They are Emergence engineers, part of the team at every company they serve, and you are the person who makes sure that is true.

The mandate is two-sided. You build the organization, and you build the engineering system behind it: the processes, infrastructure, and cross-cutting capabilities that let a lean team take an idea to production fast, at a quality level that holds, and then carry that same system into every company we own.

This is not a request to manage a team. It is a mandate to build an engineering organization across a portfolio of companies, with direct exposure to the CEOs, CTOs, and operating partners who run them. Very few engineering leaders get to say they have done that.

How It Works

- We want you to see the whole picture before you apply, so here is the structure you will be stepping into.

- The Center of Excellence sits at the center. It sources, vets, and sets a single quality bar for engineering talent across the portfolio, and it owns the deployment model: which engineers go where, for how long, and to what standard. You lead it.

- Engineers are organized by vertical. Each vertical (healthcare, automotive, infrastructure) has its own pod of engineers who build domain fluency together and can move between the companies in that vertical as needs change. Pods are led by you and your leads, staffed from Cairo, and integrated day to day into the squads at the companies they serve.

- Cross-cutting capabilities run across every vertical. Some competence does not belong to one industry: building AI agents and agentic workflows, data and analytics, automation, and the platform and infrastructure practices that make delivery fast and safe. You build these as portfolio-level capabilities, develop the engineers who carry them, and make them available to every company we own so that no OpCo has to solve the same problem twice.

- Engineers are forward deployed into companies we own. This is not a services or customer-facing model. An engineer works inside an Emergence portfolio company for a tour, embedded in that company’s squads, taking direction on priorities from that company’s technical leader. That leader sets the work and accepts the work. You own the engineer: their standards, their growth, their performance, and the decision about where they go next. We never place an engineer with a technical leader who does not want them. And because the engineers stay Emergence engineers, you live with the consequences of your placements and your standards across the whole portfolio, not just until a project closes.

- A biweekly forum closes the loop. Every two weeks, per vertical, you chair a sixty-minute forum with the portfolio companies’ technical leaders, the pod leads, and the Emergence operating partner for that vertical. Everyone hears the same feedback at the same time. Talent calibration, staffing changes, and unmet needs are decided in the room, and two weeks later the same room asks whether it moved. That cadence is what turns a dotted line into a real reporting relationship, and you own it.

- You also lead engineering at Emergence itself. Our central team builds the internal platforms and AI-driven tooling that Emergence uses across the portfolio. That team rolls up to you and is where new engineers are trained before they deploy. It is also your proving ground: the place you refine how we build before you carry it into the OpCos. You are the engineering counterpart to our head of product.

- It starts focused and grows. The first deployments are deliberate: a small number of engineers into a small number of companies, so the model is proven on results rather than promises. From there the plan is to scale. Emergence’s portfolio is growing, every company in it needs strong engineering, and the Center of Excellence is designed to grow into dozens of teams across the portfolio. You will be the one who built it from the first hire.

What You’ll Do

- Build the Center of Excellence from its first hires into a multi-vertical engineering organization, and be accountable for its results across the portfolio

- Own the quality bar. Define what a top-tier engineer looks like at Emergence, hold every hire and every deployed engineer to it, and act quickly when someone is not clearing it

- Own the caliber of every engineer who joins. Emergence builds and filters the candidate funnel for you, with dedicated recruiting resources behind it; your job is the judgment at the top of it, deciding who clears the bar and who does not, and scaling an organization of versatile, highly functional engineers from those decisions

- Lead the forward-deployment model: which engineers go where, for how long, and what they are accountable for while they are there

- Chair the biweekly vertical forums with portfolio…