Head of Engineering & Architecture

Nando's Technology is in the middle of a genuinely exciting transformation — moving towards autonomous, product-aligned teams that are empowered to own outcomes, not just outputs. As a Head of Engineering, you'll lead one of our five core domains, shaping how engineering works within it and contributing to how we all work together across the wider technology group. You'll be the architectural authority for your domain — owning the application catalogue, setting the technical direction of the products within it, and making sure the decisions your teams take today are ones we can build on for years to come. That means thinking carefully about how systems connect, where complexity lives, and how to keep the landscape coherent as Nando's continues to grow.

You'll be an inspirational leader — someone who sets a clear vision, raises the bar, and brings people with them. You'll create an environment where Technical Leads and engineers are motivated to do their best work, take pride in their craft, and connect what they build to real impact for Nandocas, customers, and restaurants. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role. You won't be writing production code day-to-day, but you'll need to remain technically credible — able to challenge assumptions, guide architectural thinking, and make good decisions about quality, security, and scalability alongside your teams.

Stakeholders:

• Head of Technology & Architecture
• Leadership Team members aligned to your domain
• Head of Product and Delivery and Group Product Managers in your domain
• Heads of Function associated with your teams
• Operations leadership (MD, Regional Directors, Patrao) where relevant to your domain

Responsibilities:

Architecture & Technical Direction:

• Own the architecture of your domain — setting the technical direction, defining principles, and ensuring decisions are coherent, scalable, and aligned with the wider Nando's technology strategy.
• Maintain and evolve the application catalogue for your domain: understanding what we run, why we run it, how it connects, and where we need to change.
• Shape the product direction from a technology perspective — working with product leadership to define what we build, what we buy, and what we retire.
• Evaluate new technologies and approaches, bringing considered recommendations to the team rather than chasing novelty.
• Contribute to cross-domain architectural thinking alongside the other Heads of Engineering and the Head of Technology & Architecture — making sure domain decisions don't create problems at the seams.
• Ensure security, compliance, and data management considerations are built into architectural thinking from the outset, not bolted on afterwards.

Leading Your Engineering Teams:

• Set a clear vision for your domain's engineering teams — one that connects day-to-day work to broader technology and business goals.
• Inspire and develop your Technical Leads, challenging them to grow as leaders and holding a high bar for engineering excellence.
• Build a culture of accountability, ambition, and continuous improvement — where teams take ownership and are proud of what they ship.
• Create an environment where engineers feel motivated, valued, and able to bring their best thinking to work.
• Lead on hiring and talent development, building a strong and diverse engineering team over time.

Engineering Quality & Delivery:

• Set and uphold high standards of engineering quality — covering testing practice, code quality, security, and operational reliability.
• Drive a culture of continuous improvement: retrospectives, blameless post-mortems, and learning from incidents.
• Oversee the technical health of your domain's systems — including technical debt, architecture evolution, and scalability.
• Partner with QA Engineers to embed quality throughout the delivery process, not just at the end.

Strategy & Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Contribute to the technology strategy for your domain, in partnership with your Group Product Manager and the Head of Technology & Architecture.
• Help shape team goals, OKRs, and roadmap priorities — bringing an engineering perspective to product and commercial decisions.
• Facilitate alignment across teams, surfacing dependencies and risks early.
• Partner with senior stakeholders in your domain to understand their goals and translate them into clear engineering outcomes.
• Contribute to wider Technology leadership — participating in strategy forums, cross-domain working groups, and helping shape how we operate as an engineering organisation.

Vendor & Commercial Management:

• Manage key technology vendor and agency relationships relevant to your domain.
• Oversee commercial arrangements and ensure delivery against contractual commitments, in partnership with Group Product Managers.

Engineering Community:

• Help build and sustain engineering communities of practice across Nando's — sharing knowledge, patterns, and approaches that raise the bar for everyone.
• Contribute to how we evolve our engineering operating model, ways of working, and team structures over time.

Qualifications:

• Proven experience leading and developing multiple engineering teams, including people who lead people (i.e. managing Technical Leads).
• A track record of inspiring high-performing engineering teams — setting direction, raising standards, and creating a culture people want to be part of.
• A strong architectural background — able to own and evolve a domain's technical landscape, make principled decisions about system design, and maintain a coherent application catalogue.
• Experience setting the technical direction for a product or platform, including decisions about build vs buy, tooling choices, and long-term technology investment.
• A strong grasp of modern cloud platforms and architectures — comfortable challenging design decisions and understanding their implications for reliability, security, and cost.
• Experience working across a mix of languages, frameworks, and tools — curious about the right approach rather than wedded to a single stack.
• A track record of working directly with senior business stakeholders — able to translate complex technical topics clearly and build genuine trust with non-technical partners.
• Strong problem-solving skills with the communication ability to bring people with you — analytical and clear-headed, but also genuinely good with people.
• A good instinct for prioritisation — able to weigh technical quality, business impact, and team capacity when making tradeoffs.
• Practical understanding of how security, data management, and compliance considerations shape engineering decisions.
• Experience leading or contributing to quality engineering practice — including test strategy, CI/CD, and QA team collaboration.