Director of Software Engineering

Director of Engineering in SaaS or Product

Shape the Future of Engineering in a High-Growth SaaS Business

An ambitious, product-led SaaS organisation is looking for a Director of Engineering to play a pivotal leadership role during the next phase of its growth. Following significant expansion and the appointment of a new VP of Engineering, this is a newly created position designed to strengthen engineering leadership and help scale a rapidly growing technology function.

This is far more than a delivery leadership role. You'll partner closely with the VP of Engineering to help shape the organisation, develop engineering leaders, improve engineering effectiveness and drive one of the company's most exciting strategic initiatives - becoming an AI-first engineering organisation.

If you enjoy building high-performing leadership teams, influencing engineering strategy and creating the environment where engineers can do their best work, this is an opportunity to have genuine organisational impact.

The Opportunity

Reporting directly into the VP of Engineering, you'll provide operational leadership across an engineering organisation of approximately 45 engineers spanning 7-9 engineering teams.

Rather than managing individual contributors, your focus will be on developing Engineering Managers, Senior Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers - creating a high-performing leadership layer capable of supporting continued business growth.

Working closely with Product and Commercial leaders, you'll balance engineering capacity with business priorities while driving improvements in delivery performance, engineering productivity and organisational effectiveness.

You'll also play a key role in embedding AI into software engineering practices and helping shape the future direction of the organisation as it continues to scale.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead, coach and develop Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers.
• Strengthen leadership capability, accountability and performance across Engineering.
• Partner with Product leadership to align engineering delivery with commercial priorities.
• Improve engineering effectiveness through metrics and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Champion AI adoption across engineering teams and software delivery practices.
• Support organisational planning, succession planning and career development.
• Collaborate with senior technical leaders to ensure technology strategy aligns with business goals.
• Help shape organisational design as the engineering function continues to grow.
• Support ongoing engineering transformation, architectural evolution and future organisational scaling initiatives.

What We're Looking For

You'll already be operating as an Director of Engineering, Senior Head of Engineering or within a Senior Leader capacity within a modern, product-led software business.

You'll bring:

• Experience leading multiple engineering teams through Engineering Managers (manager-of-managers) - minimum of 35 people.
• Operated as a Director of / Senior Engineering Lead across 2 or more roles developing Engineering Managers and building leadership capability.
• Must have experience within high-growth, product-led SaaS environments.
• Exceptional people leadership and coaching skills.
• Strong partnership experience with Product leadership.
• Experience improving engineering performance using frameworks such as DORA, SPACE or similar.
• A proven track record of scaling engineering organisations and leading organisational change.
• Strong commercial awareness and the ability to balance engineering excellence with business outcomes.

Desirable Experience

Experience in any of the following would be beneficial:

• Private equity-backed or scale-up businesses.
• AI adoption or engineering transformation programmes.
• M&A integration.
• Modern cloud-native technology environments including PHP, React, AWS and PostgreSQL.
• Quality Engineering transformation and shift-left testing practices.

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to join a business investing heavily in engineering, AI and product innovation during one of the most exciting periods in its journey.

You'll benefit from:

• £120,000 - £150,000 base salary.
• Equity package.
• Remote with 1x a month travel to London.
• Significant influence across Engineering and Product.
• The opportunity to shape an AI-first engineering organisation.
• Exposure to large-scale organisational growth and future acquisitions.
• Genuine scope to influence engineering culture, organisational design and leadership capability.