Head of Software Engineering

Head of Engineering

Manchester | Hybrid (2 days/week)

£125k–£150k + Bonus + Equity

We’re hiring a Head of Engineering to lead the rebuild of a complex, cloud-native platform used by millions. It’s a high-impact, senior leadership role — reporting directly to the CTO — where you’ll shape technical strategy, modernise the estate, and scale best practice across multiple product squads.

This isn’t about managing delivery from the sidelines. You’ll be hands-on with architecture decisions, setting coding standards, and designing workflow systems that can be rolled out and replicated across customers and products. You’ll influence how we scale, how we work, and how engineering shows up across the business.

What you’ll 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 we’re 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

We’re 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?

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