Director of Engineering in Nottingham

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. People here came from Google, Meta, Vercel, and high-growth scaleups. The VP of Engineering spent 9+ years at Google managing infrastructure teams at significant scale before joining at an early stage. This is not a corporate environment. Founders are hands-on, technical, and have high standards. The people who thrive here have opinions, make decisions, and lead from the front.

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 includes a track record conversation (45 min, remote), incident response / technical leadership (45 min, remote), and 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 includes a competitive base salary, meaningful equity, and benefits. Range discussed on first conversation.