Head of Engineering - Commercial Platform

At On, the most exciting and fastest-growing global sports brand, we are looking for a Head of Engineering – Commercial Platform to lead the teams responsible for the core commercial foundation that powers On across every channel: Retail, DTC, Wholesale, and future growth vectors.

This role owns the platforms that make experiences possible at scale — POS & Retail Experience Platform, Customer Profile Platform, Customer Communication Platform, Merchandising & Pricing Platform, Commercial Product API Platform, and Growth & Expansion Platform. Your mission is to build a cohesive, reliable, and reusable platform foundation so any channel team can build on top without extra effort, accelerating On’s commercial expansion for the coming years.

You will manage multiple teams (ICs + Engineering Managers), drive platform strategy and technical excellence, and partner closely with Product, Data, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and Experience Engineering leaders to ensure the platform is scalable, composable, resilient, and easy to consume.

Your entrepreneurial and results-driven mindset, paired with strong platform engineering depth and proven global-scale execution, will make you a key member of the leadership team shaping On’s future commercial capabilities.

Your Mission

• Lead Platform Vision — and Deliver Leverage
• Lead and grow multiple engineering teams responsible for On’s commercial platform foundation
• Shape platform strategy, operating model, and multi-year roadmap in partnership with Product and senior leadership
• Define what “platform success” means: adoption, reliability, time-to-integrate, reuse, and developer/consumer experience
• Stay deeply hands-on: drive architectural reviews, challenge design decisions, and ensure strong technical governance
• Ensure alignment with On Tech’s architecture north star and long-range platform strategy
• Build a Commercial Foundation that Scales Globally
• Own the technical excellence of platform services that operate across regions, channels, and market constraints
• Build composable platform capabilities (APIs, events, domain services, shared data contracts) that minimize duplication and unlock velocity.
• Build predictable execution: de-risk delivery, manage dependencies, and reduce lead time for platform consumers
• Drive platform maturity across:
• Reliability & Resilience (SLOs/SLIs, incident management, disaster recovery, offline-first patterns where needed)
• Security & Privacy (identity, authorization, consent, data retention, regulatory requirements)
• Scalability & Performance (traffic spikes, seasonal peaks, product drops, store operations)
• Observability & Operability (monitoring, tracing, on-call excellence, runbooks)
• Enable Experience Teams with a World-Class Developer Platform Mindset
• Treat internal experience teams (DTC, retail, growth, wholesale) as customers — optimize for ease of use, documentation, and self-service
• Establish high-quality platform interfaces: API standards, event contracts, SDKs, versioning, backward compatibility, and migration playbooks
• Build strong cross-team collaboration patterns to unblock experience teams and drive shared outcomes
• Balance autonomy and alignment: empower teams while ensuring consistency, governance, and simplicity

Operate with “High Heat” Excellence

• On is a high-growth brand: launches, drops, peak demand, store openings, and market expansion create real operational pressure
• Build systems and teams that thrive in high-stakes environments by:
• enforcing SLO ownership and operational readiness
• raising incident response standards and postmortem quality
• ensuring robust rollout strategies, feature flags, and fallback mechanisms
• Make “boring reliability” a platform feature

Shape Culture, Talent, and the Leadership Bench

• Foster a culture rooted in curiosity, craftsmanship, feedback, and accountability
• Coach Engineering Managers and senior engineers; build a strong leadership pipeline
• Own hiring, performance, and org design — always raising the bar and improving how we recruit and onboard
• Model On’s values and tech principles through visible leadership and clear standards

Connect Platform Work to Business Impact

• Translate commercial strategy into platform bets and measurable outcomes
• Build a platform that reduces time-to-market for: new stores and store formats, new regions and regulatory requirements, new partners and channels & new growth experiments
• Make trade-offs with clarity: time-to-deliver vs. long-term leverage, local optimization vs. global standardization, build vs. buy.

Your story

• Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams (ICs + EMs), ideally in platform-heavy, product-driven organizations
• Deep platform engineering expertise with a track record of building and scaling global, distributed, mission-critical platforms
• Strong architectural leadership across domains such as:
• identity and access (IDP, authN/authZ, consent)
• customer profile and customer-360 patterns
• communication orchestration (email/SMS/push), preference management
• merchandising and pricing systems (rules, experimentation, governance, auditability)
• retail/POS platforms (offline resilience, device constraints, fiscalization readiness is a plus)
• Strong product and stakeholder mindset: you can simplify complexity, align diverse groups, and drive decisions in sophisticated environments
• A track record of predictable delivery with high quality — you can navigate ambiguity, dependencies, and cross-functional constraints.
• Fluent communicator: you tell compelling technical stories and create clarity for all levels (ICs to execs)
• Strong people leadership: you coach leaders, build healthy teams, and cultivate high performance
• A startup mindset: resourceful, iterative, bias-to-action, and comfortable building foundations while the company scales rapidly
• Collaborative, humble, and energized by On’s mission to ignite human spirit through movement

About the Team

As you might expect from a running brand, the wider E-Commerce team at On is a fast-paced place to be. You will work in the diverse Berlin-based Customer platform team as part of Commercial Technology. You will collaborate with roles including Software Engineers, QA Engineers, Product Managers, Data Analytics, Marketing and others of stream-aligned or platform teams that are located in Berlin, Zurich and London.

Home to nearly 3000 parks, a population speaking more than 300 languages, and a vibrant art and music scene, London is one of the world’s most loved cities for good reason.

On is a place that is centered around growth and progress. We offer an environment designed to give people the tools to develop holistically – to stay active, to learn, explore and innovate. Our distinctive approach combines a supportive, team-oriented atmosphere, with access to personal self-care for both physical and mental well-being, so each person is led by purpose.

On is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating a work environment that is fair and inclusive, where all decisions related to recruitment, advancement, and retention are free of discrimination.

We want to set everyone up for success, so here’s the lowdown on how we hire. Our process is a two-way street – bringing you into our culture, while helping us learn how you think.

Our full process can last about eight weeks from application to offer, because we care about getting it right. These steps explain how we usually do things.

Before you get started, feel free to consider if you want to work with us. Strange question? Well, we give people a lot of space to navigate their day-to-day and that style isn’t for everyone. We want you to be passionate about what you do and be sure this is the right fit. Because when skills and passion combine – it creates that 'Wow' moment.

Step One: It starts with you... You’ll start by submitting your application to a specific role. We try to keep this step as simple as possible. We do get a lot of applications, but we review them all. If you’re a good fit to the role, a recruiter will follow up with you directly. If you didn’t receive a reply, or were unsuccessful this time around, we encourage you to look for other possible matches at On.