Head of Engineering

A fantastic opportunity for a Head of Engineering to join a well established software organisation undergoing a major technical evolution. This is a senior strategic role leading engineering, QA and cloud operations through a significant SaaS migration and AI enablement programme. You will drive organisational development, technical excellence and delivery maturity while guiding the modernisation of a complex product suite used at scale across two main sectors.

Location: Hybrid with 2 days a week in the Milton Keynes office, UK based

Salary: £85,000 - £90,000 per annum with excellent benefits and performance bonus

Requirements for Head of Engineering:

• Strong experience leading large engineering organisations delivering enterprise SaaS products, or transforming legacy on premise or hosted products into SaaS models
  
• Proven leadership background managing engineering managers and multiple cross functional teams
  
• Strong ability to build, develop and scale technical organisations of 30 people or more
  
• Deep technical grounding with hands on exposure to Azure, AWS or GCP, enterprise software architecture and modern engineering practices
  
• Experience of large scale platform migrations, customer transitions and maintaining service continuity
  
• Background working with blended QA teams and embedding quality engineering practices
  
• Understanding of SRE principles, Infrastructure as Code and cloud operations in product driven environments
  
• Excellent ability to drive collaboration across engineering, product, security, professional services and customer facing teams
  
• Highly advantageous experience includes: regulated environments, multi cloud operations, AI or ML integration, multi region deployments, education sector systems, API first platforms, legacy to modern engineering uplift
  

Responsibilities for Head of Engineering:

• Lead and develop engineering managers and technical leads, embedding a culture of quality, innovation and customer focus
  
• Shape talent strategy, build high performing teams and create clear progression frameworks across engineering
  
• Oversee outsourced QA partnership, define quality metrics, integrate QA within agile workflows and drive continuous improvement in automation and quality engineering
  
• Lead the evolution of cloud operations into a product aligned SRE function, embedding Infrastructure as Code, reliability principles and operational excellence
  
• Partner closely with product, CTO and wider business teams to ensure delivery aligns with strategic priorities
  
• Collaborate with sales, customer experience, professional services and implementation teams to support customer transitions
  
• Embed security by design in collaboration with information security and compliance teams
  
• Provide architectural direction for SaaS migration, cloud native evolution, microservices, API design and AI engineering methodologies
  
• Guide the introduction of AI capabilities across the product suite and ensure responsible AI practices, governance and sector aligned compliance
  
• Drive platform modernisation, customer migration tooling, integration frameworks and data integrity for large scale transitions
  
• Maintain engineering standards covering code quality, documentation, testing, CI/CD, observability and security
  
• Establish metrics driven engineering practices and lead initiatives to reduce lead time, improve deployment frequency and optimise reliability
  
• Ensure compliance with ISO27001, GDPR, PCI DSS and sector specific requirements
  

Key focus areas for the first 18 to 24 months:

• Deliver the engineering enablement plan across SaaS and AI objectives
  
• Oversee the technical and operational direction of the SaaS transformation
  
• Ensure smooth, reliable customer migrations with no service disruption
  
• Strengthen organisational capability through structured hiring and development
  
• Embed AI engineering maturity, infrastructure and best practice
  
• Drive improvements in deployment cadence, reliability and operational excellence
  

What the role offers:

• Leadership of a high impact engineering function during a major technology transformation
  
• The opportunity to shape the future of a complex product suite used at scale
  
• Collaborative, people focused working culture with strong professional development pathways
  

Applications:
If you would like to apply for this unique Head of Engineering position, please send your CV via the relevant links.
We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. If you require reasonable adjustments for your application or during the review process, please highlight this by separately emailing (url removed). If this email address has been removed by the job board, our full contact details are available on our website.

Keywords: Head of Engineering / Director of Engineering / Engineering Manager / VP Engineering / Software Engineering Lead / SaaS Engineering Lead / Cloud Engineering Manager / Technical Director / Platform Engineering / SRE Leadership / Azure / AWS / GCP / SaaS Migration / Microservices / Infrastructure as Code / Kubernetes / CI/CD / AI Engineering / Machine Learning / API Architecture