Head of Software Engineering

Head of Engineering

Manchester | Hybrid (2 days/week)

125k150k + Bonus + Equity

Were hiring a Head of Engineering to lead the rebuild of a complex, cloud-native platform used by millions. Its a high-impact, senior leadership role reporting directly to the CTO where youll shape technical strategy, modernise the estate, and scale best practice across multiple product squads.

This isnt about managing delivery from the sidelines. Youll be hands-on with architecture decisions, setting coding standards, and designing workflow systems that can be rolled out and replicated across customers and products. Youll influence how we scale, how we work, and how engineering shows up across the business.

What youll be doing:

• Leading and mentoring multiple cross-functional engineering teams
• Architecting a modular, cloud-native platform (Azure/AWS your call)
• Driving a culture shift across engineering CI/CD, SRE, DevEx, clean code
• Setting engineering standards: quality gates, testing practices, observability, automation
• Working with Product, Delivery, and Exec teams to align on priorities and timelines

What were looking for:

• Senior engineering leader (Head of / Director level) with strong architectural credentials
• Proven experience in platform or workflow system design scalable, repeatable, secure
• Comfortable leading cultural and technical change in growing or post-acquisition environments
• Hands-on enough to mentor, challenge ideas, and lead from the front
• Strong stakeholder skills credible with engineers and the boardroom

Were rebuilding with a clean slate mindset modern, cloud-native, and fully automated from day one.

• Kubernetes for orchestration fully containerised architecture
• Cloud-agnostic setup (AWS, Azure, or GCP your influence matters)
• Event-driven design, modern API practices (REST, gRPC)
• TypeScript across services and frontend (frameworks are flexible)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• CI/CD baked in, GitOps model preferred
• Emphasis on testing, observability, and secure-by-design

Why this role?

Youll join a profitable, well-backed SaaS business with real scale and a brief to modernise how engineering operates from the ground up. Youll have the autonomy to set direction and the support to deliver. Its rare to find a role at this level where you can make this much of a mark.