Head of Engineering, Demand

Role Overview

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of approximately 15–20 engineers across multiple squads, including Tech Leads and Senior Engineers
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations
• Have the hard conversations: give direct, constructive feedback and hold people accountable to high standards
• Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
• Recruit and onboard engineering talent as the team scales, raising the bar with each hire
• Champion engineering wellbeing and sustainable pace, intervening early when teams are at risk
• Own engineering delivery across the Demand domain-ensuring work is planned, tracked, and shipped on time and to a high standard
• Deeply involved in delivery mechanics, not just high-level steering
• Drive delivery predictability through disciplined sprint execution, clear capacity planning, and proactive risk management
• Establish engineering metrics (DORA or equivalent) that give leadership and squads clear visibility into delivery health.
• Establish clear reporting cadences so that delivery progress, blockers, and risks are visible to leadership at all times
• Drive a quality-first engineering culture
• Own incident response with clear SLAs and ensure post-mortems drive real improvement
• Reduce bug volume and improve resolution times through systematic root cause analysis
• Champion observability, monitoring, and alerting across all Demand systems
• Balance feature work with technical health
• Work in lockstep with the Head of Product (UK) & Head of Engineering (Supply) to align on product and engineering priorities such as delivery trade-offs and platform consistency
• Partner with Commercial, Operations, Marketing, and Data teams to ensure engineering initiatives deliver business outcomes
• Present engineering progress, metrics, and risks to senior leadership clearly and regularly
• Champion the adoption of AI assisted development tools (Claude Code, agentic coding workflows) across your engineering teams
• set expectations, remove blockers, and measure impact
• Help shape the cultural shift: encourage experimentation, reduce fear of new workflows, and ensure the team sees AI tooling as an enabler rather than a threat

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering with at least 3+ years in engineering management, leading teams of 10+ engineers
• Leadership-first mindset
• you identify primarily as a people leader and delivery driver, not as an architect or IC who also manages
• Proven track record of building high-performing teams
• hiring, coaching, developing, and when necessary, performance managing
• you’re comfortable with difficult conversations and give feedback that lands
• Delivery excellence
• you've run teams that ship predictably, with clear sprint discipline, capacity planning, and visible progress tracking. You've also built or improved incident response processes and on-call cultures.
• Engineering metrics experience
• you've implemented DORA metrics or equivalent tooling and used them to drive real improvement (not just dashboards)
• Mobile app engineering oversight
• experience leading teams building and shipping native iOS and Android applications at scale
• Technical fluency
• you can engage meaningfully with engineers on architecture, system design, and technical trade-offs
• you don’t need to write the code, but you need to understand it
• AI-forward mindset
• genuinely excited about AI-assisted development and its potential to transform engineering productivity; you’ve started experimenting with or rolling out tools like Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar in your teams
• Bonus experience
• Experience in marketplace, ecommerce, or consumer platform businesses
• Background in mobility, location-based services, or payments
• Familiarity with PHP Laravel, TypeScript, Golang, React, or AWS/GCP ecosystems
• Experience with compliance-heavy environments (PCI, SOC 2, Cyber Essentials Plus)
• Previous experience in organisations transitioning from founder/technical-led engineering to professional engineering management
• Startup or scaleup experience, operating with pace, ambiguity, and resource constraints

Tech Stack

• Android
• AWS
• Google Cloud Platform
• iOS
• Laravel
• PHP
• React
• TypeScript
• Go

Benefits

• Generous holiday policy: 25 days + bank holidays + managers can grant up to 5 extra days for high performance (total of 38 days a year)
• Free lunch on all office days via Feedr with daily meal choice
• Free snacks & drinks on all office days
• Private Medical Insurance with Vitality
• Life assurance through YuLife
• £25 credit for eye tests per year
• Free O2 concert tickets through our partnership with the O2
• £50 parking credit per month via JustPark
• Cycle-to-work salary sacrifice scheme
• EV salary sacrifice car scheme via Octopus Energy
• Enhanced parental leave with 6-months enhanced maternity leave and 4 weeks fully-paid paternity leave
• Help finding great childcare with funded hours via Koru Kids
• Competitive pension offering with standard and salary sacrifice options
• Quarterly away days with the whole UK team
• Quarterly team social budget
• Social activities and celebrations on our gorgeous rooftop in King's Cross