Head of Engineering at Lemon.io - Remote Worldwide — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Async-first and fully distributed — Lemon.io explicitly lists experience with "distributed, async-first teams" as a requirement, which is a strong green flag for location-independent workers. The company already operates across Ukraine, Europe, Canada, and the US, signaling genuine timezone tolerance rather than performative flexibility.
Timezone flexibility: No fixed hours are mentioned in the posting. Given the multi-continent team spread, synchronous overlap is likely limited to a few core hours. Expect some scheduling around European or US Eastern time for founder syncs, but day-to-day work appears largely self-directed.
Visa considerations for nomads: As a worldwide role, you can work from virtually any country. Popular nomad hubs well-suited for this role include:
- Lisbon, Portugal — Digital nomad visa available; ~$2,500–3,500/mo comfortable living costs
- Bangkok, Thailand — Long-Term Resident (LTR) visa or METV; ~$1,500–2,200/mo
- Medellín, Colombia — Digital nomad visa (up to 2 years); ~$1,500–2,000/mo
No salary data is disclosed, but Head of Engineering / VP Engineering roles at companies this size typically command $150K–$220K+ annually — providing strong purchasing power in all three destinations.
No explicit travel perks (coworking stipend, equipment budget) are mentioned. Worth clarifying in the interview process, especially for a senior leadership hire where home-office setup matters.
About Lemon.io
Lemon.io is a profitable, growing talent marketplace that connects vetted senior engineers with companies that need them. We've been in business for 10 years, have 60 people across Ukraine, Europe, Canada, and the US, and process over $16M in annual GMV. We compress the traditional 2–5 week hiring timeline down to 24–48 hours through a curated, pre-vetted supply of developers.
Hiring is still broken. Recruiters spend weeks building candidate pipelines on traditional platforms, burning energy on unqualified leads. We're building the product that changes that — giving recruiters qualified, vetted candidates within 24 hours without the grind. This is a pivotal moment: we're transitioning from a services-driven marketplace to a technology-driven platform. We need an engineering leader who can drive that transformation.
The Role
You will own engineering at Lemon.io. You'll lead a growing team of engineers, make critical architecture and prioritization decisions, and be directly accountable for the speed and quality of what we ship. This is not a management-layer role. You'll be hands-on, deeply involved in product decisions, and working side by side with the founder.
What You'll Do:
- Own the technical roadmap and make sure every engineering effort maps directly to business impact. No features for features' sake.
- Lead and grow an engineering team that ships fast, iterates constantly, and treats complexity as a cost.
- Tackle the hard, multi-layered problem: automated vetting, intelligent matching at scale, demand-side bottlenecks — and figure out where the real leverage is.
- Make hard prioritization calls. Decide what we build, what we skip, and what we kill.
- Work directly with the founder and product team to define what success looks like before writing a single line of code.
- Build the engineering culture: high ownership, high speed, low bureaucracy.
Who You Are:
- Product-minded, business-first
- Obsessed with simplicity
- First principles thinker
- Fast. Bias toward action
Experience:
- You've led engineering teams (5–30+ people) at a startup or high-growth company.
- You have hands-on experience with modern stacks and are comfortable with AI/ML tooling.
- You've worked in a distributed, async-first team.
Why Lemon.io:
- Profitable and growing. No fundraising pressure, real business fundamentals.
- A pivotal moment: you're not maintaining an engine, you're building one. The product roadmap is wide open.
- Direct access to the founder. No layers. Your decisions ship.
- A massive, unsolved problem: hiring is still broken. We're building the product that makes it radically faster for companies to find qualified engineers.
- A team of 60 people who move fast, care deeply, and have survived the hard years together.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role fully remote with no location restrictions?
What does 'hands-on' mean for this engineering leadership role?
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