Interim VP of Engineering - AI-First SaaS Leader

ABOUT BEAMERY We are a leading transformational AI platform in the HR technology industry, enabling enterprise companies to create better and fairer talent decisions - by accelerating their recruiting processes, unlocking successful internal mobility opportunities, enabling smarter upskilling initiatives, and facilitating agile workforce planning. We are helping our clients hire and redeploy over a million people annually. Deepening our native integrations with SAP, Workday, Microsoft, and LinkedIn to seamlessly embed our skills intelligence into the platforms where critical workforce decisions are made. Embedding our agentic AI to help customers plan smarter for the future - powering workforce strategies, internal mobility, and skills forecasting. Advancing our use of proprietary LLMs and knowledge graph technology to help organizations unlock broader talent pools, make fairer decisions, and expand access to opportunity at scale. But it's not all about creating high-quality products; we also very much value the company culture we have worked hard to create; built on trust, empathy & honesty ensuring our workforce is able to bring their full selves to work.

About the opportunity at Beamery We are seeking a seasoned and execution-focused Interim VP of Engineering to lead our engineering organisation through a critical period of growth and transition. Reporting to the CPTO, and working as an equal partner to Product and Data Science, you'll lead an experienced engineering organisation spanning product engineering, platform, technical support, and IT - with a substantial team of managers, leads, principals, and engineers. Working in close partnership with the CPTO, you'll ensure engineering decisions and delivery are tied to commercial and delivery outcomes - revenue, cost, speed, and reliability. This will be an interim 6 month role, with the possibility of extension upon the completion of the initial engagement.

Key responsibilities

• Accountability & Results
• Own day-to-day leadership of the full engineering organisation - product engineering, platform, technical support, and IT
• Set, deliver, and report engineering OKRs and KPIs in partnership with the CPTO - deployment frequency, lead time to change, commitment vs. delivery ratio, cost to serve, and team health
• Leadership & Development
• Coach and develop engineering managers and leads - building autonomous, self-sufficient delivery teams that don't need to escape to thrive
• Own hiring and performance decisions at the team level
• Strategy & Architecture
• Define and evolve the technical strategy for how Beamery builds and operates its platform - in close alignment with product and data science direction
• Embed AI-first ways of working across the engineering organisation - accelerating delivery pace, reducing time to market, and building a culture where AI is a core part of how the team builds
• Manage tech debt pragmatically - triage and execution, in line with strategic priorities set by the CPTO
• Own the cloud infrastructure strategy and platform architecture - ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale
• Delivery & Operations
• Drive delivery throughput, predictability, and platform reliability across all teams - CI/CD, on-call, incident management, disaster recovery
• Ensure security and regulatory compliance across R&D and production platforms - including ISMS implementation and applicable industry standards
• Manage relationships with critical third-party platform and technology suppliers

What we are looking for

• 15+ years engineering; 7+ years leading orgs of 50+ at scale
• Done this before - stepped into a leadership void and built momentum fast
• Deep enterprise B2B SaaS - multi-tenant, cloud-native
• Commercially fluent - connects engineering decisions to business outcomes
• Strong people reader - knows who to back, develop, and move
• Builds teams that run themselves - autonomous execution is the goal, not dependency
• Genuine AI-native - uses AI to accelerate how the team builds, not just what it builds
• No ego about interim - outcome-focused, clean handover minded

Beamery is for Everybody. Diversity and open expression are fundamental to us. We acknowledge the challenges in our industry and strive to develop an inclusive culture where everybody can contribute. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment for everyone, regardless of ethnicity, religion, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, national origin, age, disability status, or caregiver status. If, for whatever reason, you need us to make reasonable adjustments and adaptations to our recruitment process, please email. Visit our Diversity, Equality and Inclusion page to learn more about progress and commitments.