Head of Engineering in Belfast

The Head of Engineering is responsible for leading our multi-disciplinary engineering team at Whitespace, with overall accountability for delivery, quality, and the growth and performance of the team. You will work alongside our Head of Product & Design to scale and nurture an integrated product and engineering team that is delivering a range of cutting-edge applied AI products to mission-critical environments, applying the latest thinking in knowledge graphs, hybrid multi-agent systems, distributed systems, and more. You will set a clear pace, lead with high quality and security standards, and create the conditions where great engineers can move quickly, take smart risks, and do their very best work.

As we reinvent our processes to make the most of both human and machine capabilities, you’ll need to constantly ask “how can we go faster without compromising our clients or our reputation?” You’ll join a well-funded team with strong technical foundations, proven product-market fit, true purpose and real ambition. Our strategic technical priority is developing and harnessing the next generation of our cutting edge decision superiority platform, Collective, applying its capabilities to unify our established products and point consulting solutions into a scalable, repeatable, connected ecosystem. The challenge is not only to scale what we already have, but to lead transformation with clarity and conviction, rethinking how a modern engineering organisation should operate in a world shaped by rapid iteration and AI-assisted development.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Execution and Engineering Excellence: Instil a test-first, evaluation-driven mindset across the engineering organisation, leading by example. Codify engineering standards - both ‘functional’ and ‘non-functional’ - through automated tests, to enable us to ship fast without breaking things. Build systems and practices that support both human engineers and AI agents delivering at scale into production environments. Establish engineering foundations that make it faster and easier to transform consulting-led solutions toward reusable products on a common platform. Set and uphold high engineering standards with clear accountability and continuous improvement loops.
• Velocity, Systems Thinking and Innovation: Rethink processes from first principles, especially in the context of human and AI collaboration, balancing risk appetite against velocity. Assume today’s process is already out of date, and redesign accordingly to get the most out of emerging capabilities. Drive the shift from one-off solutions to reusable products that build on and reinforce shared platform capabilities. Ensure experimentation, measurement, and fast iteration are the default, not exceptions.
• Team, Talent and Performance: Lead and develop our Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers who report into this role, setting clear expectations and building the leadership depth the organisation needs to scale. Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional engineering talent. Partner with the CTO to design the incentives, structures, and ways of working that enable people to perform at their best. Use our mission and culture to build an engineering team that sets the standard for how AI-native software gets built for high-stakes environments.
• Leadership and Collaboration: Partner closely with the CTO to shape engineering strategy and execution. Carry the room on difficult decisions and adapt style to help manage teams through significant change. Handle sceptical stakeholders by showing the work, not by selling it. Create an environment where people feel safe to experiment, challenge assumptions, and push boundaries.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading and scaling Engineering functions in fast-growing software product companies, with a track record of shipping to production at high frequency.
• Proven experience transforming engineering ways of working, promoting progressive techniques like trunk-based development, continuous delivery and test and evaluation-driven practices, and setting ambitious, measurable productivity targets that drove systemic change.
• Practical experience of agentic delivery, embedding AI coding tools and agents into real engineering workflows.
• Experience working within or alongside defence, national security, or regulated industry contexts, with a practical understanding of the associated security, compliance, and accreditation requirements.

Technical Skills

• Deep understanding of modern software architecture, distributed systems, and platform engineering, with the credibility and judgement to shape technical decisions at platform and portfolio level.
• Fluency with the agentic engineering landscape, covering coding agents, evaluation frameworks, context engineering, agent-assisted and autonomous code review, internal plugin and skill platforms, and the telemetry needed to measure and improve human and agent performance.
• Strong grounding in a range of languages, continuous delivery tooling, CI/CD, feature-toggle infrastructure, observability, and automated testing and evaluation at scale.
• Experience supporting a wide range of deployment targets, from cloud and on-premise to virtual machines, bare metal, and embedded devices, and a solid understanding of secure software development and supply-chain integrity in regulated delivery pipelines.

Skills and Behaviours

• Quality-first: treats quality, testing and evaluation as enablers for high velocity, and security and reliability as first-class engineering concerns, especially when agents are in the loop.
• Opinionated leader: holds a clear, evidence-based point of view on how modern, agent-first engineering organisations should operate, and brings others with them.
• Decisive and outcome-driven: sets ambitious, measurable productivity goals, uses them to expose and systematically remove bottlenecks, using AI thoughtfully as a force multiplier.
• Builder of people: recruits, develops, and retains exceptional engineers, and lifts the standards of everyone around them, especially in their adoption of agentic tooling.
• Pragmatic and resilient: balances technical ambition with commercial and programme realities, thriving in a fast-changing environment with significant ambiguity.

Mission and Opportunity

• Work in a serious, mission-driven company with enormous growth potential where our software has to hold up under real pressure.
• Build a new advanced platform while transforming existing products and consulting outputs into scalable offerings.
• Set the template for how engineering is done at scale in defence, national security and highly regulated settings.