Head of Engineering, Demand
JustPark
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: London • United Kingdom
Visit company websiteExplore more
Job Level
About the role
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of approximately 15–20 engineers across multiple squads, including Tech Leads and Senior Engineers
- Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations
- Have the hard conversations: give direct, constructive feedback and hold people accountable to high standards
- Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
- Recruit and onboard engineering talent as the team scales, raising the bar with each hire
- Champion engineering wellbeing and sustainable pace, intervening early when teams are at risk
- Own engineering delivery across the Demand domain-ensuring work is planned, tracked, and shipped on time and to a high standard
- Deeply involved in delivery mechanics, not just high-level steering
- Drive delivery predictability through disciplined sprint execution, clear capacity planning, and proactive risk management
- Establish engineering metrics (DORA or equivalent) that give leadership and squads clear visibility into delivery health.
- Establish clear reporting cadences so that delivery progress, blockers, and risks are visible to leadership at all times
- Drive a quality-first engineering culture
- Own incident response with clear SLAs and ensure post-mortems drive real improvement
- Reduce bug volume and improve resolution times through systematic root cause analysis
- Champion observability, monitoring, and alerting across all Demand systems
- Balance feature work with technical health
- Work in lockstep with the Head of Product (UK) & Head of Engineering (Supply) to align on product and engineering priorities such as delivery trade-offs and platform consistency
- Partner with Commercial, Operations, Marketing, and Data teams to ensure engineering initiatives deliver business outcomes
- Present engineering progress, metrics, and risks to senior leadership clearly and regularly
- Champion the adoption of AI assisted development tools (Claude Code, agentic coding workflows) across your engineering teams - set expectations, remove blockers, and measure impact
- Help shape the cultural shift: encourage experimentation, reduce fear of new workflows, and ensure the team sees AI tooling as an enabler rather than a threat
Requirements
- 8+ years in software engineering with at least 3+ years in engineering management, leading teams of 10+ engineers
- Leadership-first mindset - you identify primarily as a people leader and delivery driver, not as an architect or IC who also manages
- Proven track record of building high-performing teams - hiring, coaching, developing, and when necessary, performance managing - you’re comfortable with difficult conversations and give feedback that lands
- Delivery excellence - you've run teams that ship predictably, with clear sprint discipline, capacity planning, and visible progress tracking. You've also built or improved incident response processes and on-call cultures.
- Engineering metrics experience - you've implemented DORA metrics or equivalent tooling and used them to drive real improvement (not just dashboards)
- Mobile app engineering oversight - experience leading teams building and shipping native iOS and Android applications at scale
- Technical fluency - you can engage meaningfully with engineers on architecture, system design, and technical trade-offs - you don’t need to write the code, but you need to understand it
- AI-forward mindset - genuinely excited about AI-assisted development and its potential to transform engineering productivity; you’ve started experimenting with or rolling out tools like Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar in your teams
- Bonus experience
- Experience in marketplace, ecommerce, or consumer platform businesses
- Background in mobility, location-based services, or payments
- Familiarity with PHP Laravel, TypeScript, Golang, React, or AWS/GCP ecosystems
- Experience with compliance-heavy environments (PCI, SOC 2, Cyber Essentials Plus)
- Previous experience in organisations transitioning from founder/technical-led engineering to professional engineering management
- Startup or scaleup experience, operating with pace, ambiguity, and resource constraints
Benefits
- Generous holiday policy: 25 days + bank holidays + managers can grant up to 5 extra days for high performance (total of 38 days a year)
- Free lunch on all office days via Feedr with daily meal choice
- Free snacks & drinks on all office days
- Private Medical Insurance with Vitality
- Life assurance through YuLife
- £25 credit for eye tests per year
- Free O2 concert tickets through our partnership with the O2
- £50 parking credit per month via JustPark
- Cycle-to-work salary sacrifice scheme
- EV salary sacrifice car scheme via Octopus Energy
- Enhanced parental leave with 6-months enhanced maternity leave and 4 weeks fully-paid paternity leave
- Help finding great childcare with funded hours via Koru Kids
- Competitive pension offering with standard and salary sacrifice options
- Quarterly away days with the whole UK team
- Quarterly team social budget
- Social activities and celebrations on our gorgeous rooftop in King's Cross
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
software engineeringengineering managementDORA metricsmobile app engineeringiOS developmentAndroid developmentPHP LaravelTypeScriptGolangReact
Soft Skills
leadershipcoachingperformance managementfeedback deliveryteam buildingcommunicationproblem-solvingaccountabilitypsychological safetycontinuous improvement