Lead Software Engineer (Product Reliability Engineering)

haddock is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to build and lead a new team focused on making their product more reliable: solving complex issues, finding root causes, and using automation and AI to prevent problems from happening again.

Highlights:

💸 Competitive salary (€50–70k)

📍 Barcelona (Hybrid: at least 2 days in office, Poblenou)

✨ AI tooling to experiment with, Urban Sports Club membership, Playflow salary benefits

➡️ What is haddock?

haddock is the market leader solution for point of control in restaurants, handling all back-office vital operations like product management, inventories, purchases, price tracking, document conciliation, bank conciliation, paychecks, clocking in/out, P&L reports, etc.

Not only we have a system of record that helps operate restaurants with control and clarity, but we're also the leaders in offering AI Agents, starting with Fina. They work 24/7 doing the heavy, tedious work that our customers don't have time to do well.

This is no AI hype. Our customers obtain visible value from our AI Agents, both in money and time saved. We're becoming strategic partners in the design of their businesses.

👉 Our mission is to empower millions of restaurateurs to level up their business.

👉 Our vision is to lead the market through innovation, strong relationships and by becoming the go-to tech partner for restaurant success.

👀 haddock is backed by Y Combinator, the accelerator behind Airbnb and Twitch. We're growing fast with support from top-tier investors like JME, Decelera, Extension Fund, Wayra, and Zone2Boost.

Bonus: we're a step away from the people using what we build. Many of our restaurants are based right here in Barcelona, and they love haddock.

➡️ Can you be a haddock engineer?

Engineers at haddock are action-oriented, business-oriented, curious, communicative, autonomous, and take full ownership of their work.

They are champions of figuring out the unknowns. They talk to customers, deliver quality work, improve our tooling, and are ambitious. We look for people with these same motivations and ways of working.

We strongly adhere to the Lean Startup and Agile principles, favoring action over analysis, imperfect iteration over perfect delivery, and face-to-face communication.

➡️ The role, honestly

Right now, bug resolution at haddock is handled by a squad of two product engineers who rotate every month. It works, but it doesn't scale: twelve onboardings a year into the work that needs the most context, variable throughput month to month, and a backlog that goes down when we add people and back up when we take them away.

We're replacing that with a permanent Product Reliability Engineering team, and you'd be the first hire and the one who builds it. You'll lead two engineers plus a rotating seat from the product engineering team. This is a hands-on role where 75% of your time is expected to be spent doing software engineering work.

Conceptually, it's similar to a Support Engineering team, but so empowered with AI that we ambition going beyond "just fixing bugs", but actually creating the system and tooling to make haddock highly reliable and have issues quickly fixed.

Here's the part that matters most, and we want to be direct about it: your mission is not to close more tickets. It's to make the inflow shrink. A team that only drains a queue burns out. So this role comes with an explicit mandate, build solutions, automations and processes that improve the reliability of the product. That's the deal.

What you'll own:

• The technical escalation layer. Triage, reproduction, diagnosis and resolution of everything escalated from our Customer Experience team.
• Killing root causes. Moving from "this ticket" to "this class of ticket", and making the class go away.
• Internal tooling for data correctness. Tools to fix data in bulk without hand-written SQL, and detection that catches incoherent data before the customer does.
• The metrics and the weekly report, including where bugs come from and which squad shipped them. Quality accountability stays with the people who ship.
• Two engineers, their onboarding and their growth, plus a rotating product engineer.

Our processes and tools are constantly improving, and everyone contributes to making them better.

➡️ Example work

Some example objectives you could be working towards in your first months:

• Managing the AI agents (like our Triager agent) that triage and fix tickets in the backlog, and creating new ones as needed to automate as much of the process as possible.
• Fixing multiple issues per day, aided by swarms of AI agents that you direct with your experience, wisdom and principles.
• Attacking proactively high-volume classes of problem that you detect, like a flaky connection to Square or data correctness issue with AI-digitalized documents.
• Instrumenting real inflow and resolution metrics, like tickets per 100 accounts, so we can prove the product is getting better and not just that we're running faster.

➡️ Why join now?

If you're excited by ownership, autonomy, and building technology that directly impacts real businesses every day, this is the right moment to join.

Come on board while we're still a startup. It's much more fun and motivating than joining an already established scale up or corporation where your role is very defined and limited!

This is the first Product Reliability Engineering role at haddock. You'll set the triage policy, the severity model, the metrics and the standard. If you've been the escalation engineer inside a scale-up company and thought "I could run this function properly if it were mine", it can be.

You'll be close to the consequences. Our customers are restaurants, many of them in Barcelona, and when our data is wrong someone's margin is wrong. The feedback loop is short and real, and it's very rewarding to fix things for a restaurant you like.

haddock is an AI-first company, and so is this role. You'll use AI daily to diagnose, to navigate systems, and to build tooling. A good chunk of our product runs on AI workflows, which means a good chunk of the failure modes you'll be diagnosing are new kinds of failure modes.

➡️ Requirements

👉 5+ years of engineering experience, at least some of it in a SaaS startup or scale up.

👉 You've owned a bug backlog, either for your squad, or for the entire engineering team at your previous company.

👉 You debug code you didn't write, fast.

👉 You think in systems and processes, not only individual tickets.

👉 You've mentored or led at least 2 engineers. Management experience isn't required.

👉 AI-native way of working. You already use AI daily, with good judgement and real productivity. Candidates who don't embrace AI are not a fit.

👉 Fluent in Spanish and comfortable in English. We tend to speak Spanish at the office and in Slack, and write documentation and projects in English.

➡️ What we offer?

• 🚀 First and foremost, the project itself is the main reason why people join haddock: a growing startup with ambition, product-market fit, and great culture.
• 💸 A competitive salary (€50–70k gross/year).
• 🏢 A bright modern office in Barcelona, in Poblenou. Probably the best office you've ever worked at.
• ☯️ Hybrid work, with 2 days at the office to build trust, collaborate, align and get creative.
• 🪄 All AI tooling that you wish to experiment with.
• 🧘 A subsidized Urban Sports Club membership: yoga, HIIT, hot studios...
• 💰 Enjoy benefits when spending part of your salary, thanks to Playflow.

➡️ Our Hiring Process

We move fast and communicate openly. Our goal is to wrap up the process within a week. Here's what to expect:

1. Intro call with Guillermo (Head of Technology), 25 mins.
2. Call with Pol (co-founder), 25 mins.
3. Technical interview with Guillermo and another engineer in the team.
4. Call with Arnau (co-founder), 25 mins.

Sounds like an opportunity? Apply now. We'd love to meet you.

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