Head of Engineering

A fantastic opportunity for a Head of Engineering / Software Development Manager 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 minimum of 2 days a week in the Milton Keynes office, UK based

Salary: £85,000 - £95,000 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

You will have progressed through a Software Developer career path - while this isn't a hands on role, having an incredibly strong technical understanding and knowledge of a range of technologies is very important

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.

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