Director of Engineering

We’re a sports media network, focused on building and nurturing a portfolio of highly engaged and connected communities of sports fans and bettors to create value for our partners. We empower sports fans with real-time intelligence, premium independent content, and unique tools so they can compete in the sports betting game. FairPlay Sports Media is a collection of market leading brands including oddschecker, WhoScored, SuperScommesse, FairPlay Technologies and Confido. In addition, FairPlay has a vast network across the sports tech and media industries through our partnerships including Reach, Gazzetta dello Sport, DAZN, SportsGrid and The Jockey Club amongst others. iGaming is one of the fastest-growing and most technologically innovative sectors, and we’re on top of our game, powered by market-leading tech and driven by brilliant people. We champion diversity and operate an open and inclusive culture as well as being focused, fast-paced, and always making sure to have fun along the way.

FairPlay Sports Media is building a tech-led, AI- and data-powered sports media network that serves both owned brands (e.g., oddschecker, WhoScored.com, SuperScommesse, and others) and partners with BetTech products spanning data, display, and predictive capabilities. At FairPlay scale—real-time data, high-frequency updates, and partner integrations—you’ll lead multiple engineering teams to deliver reliable, compliant, high-throughput product execution.

What you’ll do

• Your team is your product — you’re accountable for team health, hiring, delivery outcomes, and cross-functional alignment, while remaining technically credible enough to guide architecture and trade-offs.
• Lead and grow high-performing teams.
• Own hiring strategy and capacity planning, focusing recruitment where it unlocks the most leverage.
• Coach Engineering Managers and senior engineers; create clarity, accountability, and psychological safety.
• Be accountable for predictable delivery of roadmap commitments across BetTech products (Data, Display, Predictive) and shared platform capabilities.
• Drive operational excellence for high-traffic, high-frequency systems (e.g., real-time odds/pricing and rapid data updates).
• Create a consistent, high-trust interface between Engineering and Product (and, as needed, Commercial/Partnerships), translating strategy into executable plans.
• Guide architectural decisions across APIs, data pipelines, ML-enabled products, and front-end components/widgets—ensuring systems are secure, observable, and cost-effective.
• Define, measure, and improve the metrics that matter (delivery, reliability, quality, and org health).

What success looks like

• Hiring actual vs. plan for critical teams/skills.
• Delivery throughput & predictability: roadmap commitments met with stable scope/quality.
• Reliability: improved uptime, incident rates, and mean time to restore (MTTR), especially for real-time feeds and partner-facing APIs.
• Documentation/operational readiness: runbooks, on-call hygiene, and key technical docs kept current.

What we’re looking for

• Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams (typically via Engineering Managers) in a product-led, high-availability environment.
• Strong systems and architecture judgment—able to broker high-level technical decisions and trade-offs across teams.
• Solid grasp of the DevOps lifecycle and delivery automation (CI/CD), with a track record of improving engineering productivity.
• Experience building platforms or products that integrate with external partners (APIs, SDKs, embeddable components), ideally in data rich domains.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive markets (or adjacent industries) with strong operational discipline.
• Exposure to data/ML product delivery (feature pipelines, model deployment patterns, experimentation frameworks), especially where AI-driven insights are core to the product.

Working style

• You bring clarity to ambiguous problems and drive execution/direction across functions.
• You communicate well up and down the org—aligning exec stakeholders while staying close enough to the work to unblock teams quickly.
• You care deeply about building a healthy, inclusive engineering culture where teams can do the best work of their careers.

What you’ll get back from us

• Subsidized Sky HD package, broadband and discounted sky talk.
• Free Puregym membership.
• Free healthcare with Bupa, life assurance and income protection.
• Pension scheme with up to 9% contribution from the company.
• £1,000 training fund each financial year, to spend on your professional development.
• Unlimited holiday plan.

Research shows that women and ethnic minorities are less likely to apply if they don’t meet every qualification. If you’re passionate about our purpose, determined to face challenges, and eager to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t tick every box. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive team and ensuring an accessible recruitment process. If you need any accommodations, please let us know.