Head of Engineering in Manchester

Reports to: VP of Technology

Location: Remote (UK based)

Role summary

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to take ownership of Biorelate's engineering function. You'll have six direct reports, the leads of Platform Engineering (including Security), Data Engineering, and Full-Stack Engineering, with around 13 engineers across the function in total. Most of your time will go into making the engineering organisation work well: clear ownership, effective processes, engineers who are growing, and projects that land on time. You'll still stay close enough to the technical work to make good calls (architecture reviews, knotty production incidents, the occasional spike to de-risk a new direction), but your primary contribution is organisational. You'll be helping us execute against Biorelate's mission: accelerating drug discovery by building the world's largest and most accurate biomedical knowledge graph, and getting that data to the places where it has the most impact.

What you'll own

• The engineering function. Six direct reports leading disciplines, plus the engineers within those teams. You're accountable for how the function performs as a whole: its delivery, its technical quality, its culture, and the development of the people in it.
• Technical leadership across three disciplines. You won't be the deepest expert in all areas, but you'll set the bar for what good looks like across them, hold credible technical conversations with each lead, and make the calls that span disciplines. We expect deep expertise in one of these areas and the breadth and judgement to lead specialists in the other two.
• People development. Career growth, coaching, performance, and wellbeing for your direct reports, and stewardship of the same for the wider engineering organisation. You'll set the tone for how we hire, how we promote, and how we have difficult conversations.
• Engineering practice. Raising the bar on how we review code, design systems, write documentation, run incidents, and make decisions. Not through policing, but through example and thoughtful intervention.
• Delivery. Working closely with our delivery manager to plan, sequence, and land important projects. You'll be someone the VP of Technology can trust to own real tactical and operational outcomes end-to-end.

Who we're looking for

We're not necessarily looking for a candidate who hits every one of the following points, but hopefully this gives some shape to who we have in mind.

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with a meaningful chunk in data-heavy systems: pipelines, ML platforms, large-scale ETL, knowledge graphs, search, or analytics. You should have opinions about data quality, system observability, and the failure modes of systems that process a lot of stuff.
• Significant time leading engineering teams or functions. You've run engineering organisations before, as a Head of Engineering, senior EM ready to step up, or equivalent, and you've felt the difference between managing a single team and being accountable for a function. You don't need to have led exactly this configuration before, but you've operated at this level of scope.
• Experience in both startup and mature-company environments. You've felt the difference between 'we need to ship this by Friday' and 'we need a proper RFC process,' and you've taken lessons from both.
• You've been somewhere long enough to see the consequences of your own decisions: the architectural choice that aged well, the process you introduced that quietly fell apart, the hire that changed a team's trajectory. We appreciate that engineering and management judgement are hard won, and we're looking for someone who's been through enough to have accumulated both.
• Credible across multiple engineering disciplines. Depth in one of platform/infrastructure, data engineering, or application engineering, and enough breadth to lead specialists in the other two. You know what you don't know, and you know how to lead people who know more than you do about their specific area.
• High tolerance for ambiguity. Biorelate is small, the surface area is large, and lanes aren't always clear. You're comfortable operating without perfect structure and helping to build it where it's missing.
• Strong communication, written and verbal. Most of the leverage in this role comes from clear thinking expressed clearly, which is especially tricky in a remote environment. Your instinct is to write things down, you're comfortable drafting a one-pager to explain a complex concept, you can run a productive meeting, and you have difficult conversations when one is needed.
• Curiosity about the domain and the customer. You don't need a biology background, but you should want to understand what our customers do with what we build. We're enabling our customers to improve the lives of patients by discovering new drugs, and we want someone who finds that as motivating as we do.
• Opinions about what good looks like. You can articulate what distinguishes a well-run engineering organisation from a mediocre one, and you have views on code review, testing, on-call, documentation, hiring, and career progression. Held with conviction but open to challenge.

What we do

Research and Development in the pharmaceutical industry is time-consuming, expensive, and often overlooks valuable data insights. We're changing that with AI-powered data science solutions that uncover hidden insights to support more efficient and informed drug discovery. Using AI-based Natural Language Processing, our technology extracts and structures data from millions of scientific documents, identifying causal biological relationships and organising them into knowledge graphs. This empowers bioinformaticians and biologists with a deeper understanding of the connections between diseases, proteins, and drugs. Our team consists of biomedical and data science experts with real-world lab and pharmaceutical experience. These specialists ensure that our solutions are scientifically grounded, delivering accurate, reliable data to our customers.