Director of Engineering

Location: London (hybrid)

Level: Director

Reporting to: VP of Engineering

The company is a well-funded, fast-growing B2B SaaS company that's become one of the most talked-about in its space. They've hit unicorn status and are now in the middle of a significant scaling phase — the engineering org is ~50 people today and is expected to grow to 150+ over the next 12 months. The product is used by some of the world's fastest-growing companies. The team is distributed across the UK and Europe, with a strong technical bar and a no-nonsense engineering culture.

The role involves joining as one of two Engineering Directors, sitting between the VP of Engineering and a layer of engineering managers who each lead autonomous product squads. You'll own a significant portion of the engineering organisation and be accountable for how it performs, scales, and grows. This is a player-coach role in the truest sense of leadership — not hands-on coding, but close enough to the technical work that you can hold your own in a systems design conversation, challenge architectural decisions, and earn the respect of strong engineers.

What you'll be doing:

• Managing a set of engineering managers and senior ICs, acting as their line manager, coach, and technical sounding board
• Owning the health and output of multiple product squads — delivery, quality, morale, and hiring
• Partnering with the VP of Engineering on org design, technical strategy, and how engineering scales from here
• Driving hiring across your org — you'll be building something meaningful over the next 12 months
• Feeding into cross-functional decisions alongside product, design, and go-to-market leadership
• Being the person who makes the call when things are ambiguous, moves fast when speed matters, and is comfortable having hard conversations

What we're looking for:

Must-haves:

• Experience managing engineering managers (not just individual contributors) — you've operated a layer of abstraction above the squads
• A background that combines time at a well-engineered large company and time at a high-growth B2B SaaS scaleup — you understand both how great engineering is built and what it takes to ship fast with limited resources
• The technical depth to do a credible systems design conversation — you don't need to write production code but you need to understand the tradeoffs engineers are making
• Experience in the 50–200 engineer range — you've either been through a scaling journey like this or are close enough to it that you understand what breaks and why
• Comfortable with ambiguity, fast-changing priorities, and a culture where the people above you are also deeply capable

Strong signals:

• B2B SaaS domain experience — RevOps, developer tooling, or anything close to the product surface
• You've hired well at pace — you know what great looks like and you can move quickly to close
• You've let people go when it was the right thing to do
• You've worked in a distributed team and made it work
• You're the kind of person who's done their research before walking into a room

Not a fit if:

• You're looking for a quiet, process-heavy environment
• Your default mode is 'let me set up a committee'
• You describe your leadership style primarily as 'servant leader' and leave it there
• You haven't been close to the technical work in several years

The interview process:

• Track record conversation (45 min, remote)
• Incident response / technical leadership (45 min, remote)
• Onsite in London — systems design, leadership, and founder interviews (full day)

The onsite includes a lunch checkpoint. If it's not working for either side, we stop there.

Compensation: Competitive base salary, meaningful equity, and benefits. Range discussed on first conversation.