Head of Engineering

Help build the future of fair hiring in the AI era. At Arctic Shores, we are creating a world of work where potential matters more than experience. Our market-leading, task-based psychometric assessments help organisations like Amazon, Siemens and Jet2 make fair, evidence-based hiring decisions. We have doubled ARR year-on-year for the past three years and are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead the next chapter.

This is a rare chance to lead engineering at a purpose-driven scale-up where technical excellence truly matters. You will lead a small, high-calibre team of Software Developers and DevSecOps engineers working on a Scala microservice architecture running on Kubernetes in AWS. It is built following strict functional design principles, TDD and CI/CD pipelines to automatically deploy to production. You will combine people leadership with technical evolution of the platform through guiding team architecture discussions, balancing quality with pragmatism, and ensuring our platform remains secure, scalable, resilient and cost-efficient as we grow.

Reporting to the Chief Product & Service Delivery Officer, you will partner closely with Product, Psychometric Innovation, Professional Services and Support to represent the engineering point of view in all strategy discussions. If you are excited by leading a team where you can genuinely shape the future of our platform and how it can evolve to support the business, this could be your role.

Why this role might be a great fit for you:

• You might already be a Head of Engineering looking for more autonomy and purpose.
• Or you might be an experienced Engineering Manager or Tech Lead ready for your first Head of role.
• You will thrive here if you have a strong JVM background (Scala, Kotlin or Java) particularly using functional programming principles.
• Possess a strong testing mindset with experience in TDD and CI/CD practices.
• Are experienced with AWS and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform).
• Have knowledge of event-driven architecture and API design.
• Feel confident to jump into different aspects of our code base, orient yourself and remove blockers for the team.
• Are motivated to coach and develop engineers through regular 1:1s and collaboration.
• Think about platform reliability, security, and cost efficiency as much as feature delivery.
• Like solving complex problems collaboratively and pragmatically.

If most of that resonates (even if your path has been unconventional) we would love to hear from you.

Our Stack:

• Languages & Frameworks: Scala, Kotlin, Typescript, Python, Http4s, Http4k, Circe, Cats, Cats-Effect, Doobie, React, Exposed.
• Testing: Specs2, ScalaCheck.
• Infrastructure & DevOps: AWS (EKS, Lambda, RDS/Postgres, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, S3, Cognito, Route53, VPC, EC2), Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Ansible, Puppet, GitLab CI.
• Observability & Data: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, Snowflake.

You do not need experience in every tool, but you should feel confident in modern cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code environments.

Our Engineering Philosophy:

• We follow functional programming principles.
• We run Kanban and focus on the smallest effort that delivers meaningful impact.
• We practice TDD and maintain comprehensive automated test suites.
• Everything is automated and version-controlled.
• We evolve our ways of working through team retrospectives.
• We favour simple, maintainable architectures over unnecessary complexity.

What you will do:

• Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team, aligning capacity to the roadmap and closing capability gaps.
• Shape technical direction championing best practice, guiding architecture and code quality, and aligning engineering with company strategy.
• Own delivery and reliability ensuring secure, scalable releases while optimising AWS costs.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product and customer-facing teams to deliver roadmap outcomes and ensure technical excellence.

What you will get at Arctic Shores:

• Competitive salary - £100k-£115k depending on experience.
• Share Options scheme.
• 28 days holiday plus public holidays (plus extra for length of service).
• Private medical and mental health cover.
• 2 mental wellbeing days per year.
• Aviva pension (3% employer / 5% employee).
• Hybrid working and core hours flexibility.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Fertility support.
• Company sick pay.
• Own Days - one day every month dedicated to your development.
• Cycle2Work scheme.
• Length of service awards.
• Central Manchester office location.
• A supportive team and a meaningful mission.

The closing date for applications is Monday 9th March 2026.

Our values:

• Make a difference - We cannot change everything. But we can contribute to a world of work that is truly fair and inclusive.
• Grow together - We invest in our ability, learn from setbacks, and celebrate the people behind our progress.
• Explore, always - Curiosity, drive and bravery help us break new ground and rethink how potential is measured.

Applying for the role:

If this role excites you but you do not tick every box - we would still love to hear from you. Our hiring process includes but is not limited to:

• Short application form.
• Our task-based assessment (you will receive instant feedback).
• Get to know you conversations.
• Technical test and/or technical interview.
• Panel interview, including Leadership style questions.

We are interested in how you think, how you lead, and how you build, not just the logos on your CV.

Using AI in your application:

Feel free to use AI tools to help structure your thinking or prepare but we want to see the real you.

Equal Opportunities:

At Arctic Shores, giving people a fair chance is what we do and that starts with hiring. We welcome people of any background, gender identification, race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, ability level, age, size, marital status, style, or music taste. If you need adjustments at any stage of the process, let us know and we will do everything we can to support you.

Compliance:

ISO 27001 Cyber Essentials compliant.