Kinetic

Head of Engineering

Kinetic

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Milton Keynes • 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

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Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

AWSAzureCloudGoogle Cloud PlatformMicroservices

About the role

  • **Key Responsibilities**
  • **Team Leadership & Organisational Development (70%)**
  • **Engineering Leadership**
  • - Lead, mentor, and develop engineering managers and technical leads across multiple product development teams
  • - Build and maintain a strong engineering culture focused on quality, innovation, continuous improvement, and customer-centricity
  • - Drive talent acquisition strategy and build teams capable of delivering on our SaaS and AI transformation objectives
  • - Establish clear career progression frameworks and development pathways for engineers at all levels
  • - Foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across product teams and with other departments
  • **Outsourced QA Management**
  • - Own the relationship with our outsourced QA partner, ensuring quality standards, delivery excellence, and value optimisation
  • - Define quality metrics and SLAs that align with our product delivery cadence and customer expectations
  • - Integrate QA processes seamlessly within agile development workflows across all product teams
  • - Drive continuous improvement in test automation coverage and quality engineering practices
  • **Cloud Operations & SRE Transition**
  • - Lead the evolution of the cloud operations team into a product-aligned Site Reliability Engineering function
  • - Champion the adoption of Infrastructure as Code practices across all environments and further uses AI technologies to automate provisioning and self healing platform services
  • - Integrate SRE principles into product teams, establishing service level objectives and error budgets
  • - Drive the operational excellence agenda while balancing development velocity with system reliability
  • **Cross-Functional Collaboration**
  • - Partner closely with Product Management teams, CTO, and business stakeholders to align engineering delivery with business priorities
  • - Collaborate with Sales, Customer Experience, Professional Services, and Implementation teams to ensure smooth customer transitions to new platforms
  • - Work with Information Security and Compliance team to embed security-by-design principles into development processes
  • - Engage with Strategic Partners to enable successful platform integrations and ecosystem development
  • **Technical Leadership (30%)**
  • **SaaS Transformation**
  • - Provide technical vision and architectural guidance for the migration from on-premise and hosted solutions to true multi-tenant SaaS delivery models
  • - Champion best practices in cloud-native development, microservices architecture, API design and AI Software Engineering methodologies
  • - Ensure technical decisions support scalability, security, and operational efficiency in a SaaS context
  • - Drive standardisation of technology stacks and development practices across product teams where appropriate
  • **AI Engineering Enablement**
  • - Guide the integration of AI capabilities across our product portfolio
  • - Establish engineering practices and infrastructure to support responsible AI development and deployment
  • - Build technical capability within teams to leverage AI/ML technologies effectively
  • - Ensure AI implementations meet regulatory requirements and ethical standards for the education sector
  • **Platform Modernisation & Customer Migration**
  • - Oversee the technical strategy for migrating existing customers to new products and platforms working in alignment with our AI development teams
  • - Ensure backward compatibility and data integrity throughout migration processes
  • - Drive technical excellence in areas critical to our transformation: API development, data migration tooling, integration frameworks
  • - Balance innovation with the stability required to maintain service to 700,000+ student bedrooms
  • **Technical Standards & Excellence**
  • - Set and maintain engineering standards for code quality, security, testing, and documentation
  • - Drive adoption of modern software development practices including CI/CD, automated testing, and observability
  • - Champion technical debt management and strategic refactoring initiatives
  • - Ensure compliance with ISO27001, GDPR, PCI/DSS and sector-specific requirements (e.g., HECVAT)
  • **Key Focus Areas: First 18-24 Months**
  • - **Enablement Plan Delivery**: Drive engineering execution against our strategic enablement roadmap, ensuring teams have the capabilities, tools, and processes to deliver on SaaS and AI objectives
  • - **SaaS Migration Excellence**: Oversee the technical and operational aspects of our SaaS transformation, ensuring reliable, secure, and scalable delivery models
  • - **Customer Transition Success**: Ensure smooth migration of existing customers to new products without service disruption, maintaining our reputation for reliability
  • - **Team Evolution**: Build organisational capability through strategic hiring, development programs, and the integration of cloud operations into product-aligned SRE teams
  • - **AI Engineering Maturity**: Establish the foundations for AI-enhanced products, including development practices, infrastructure, and team capabilities
  • - **Operational Excellence**: Drive improvements in deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR while maintaining ISO27001 compliance

Requirements

  • **Required Experience**
  • - **SaaS Leadership**: Proven track record of leading engineering organisations delivering enterprise SaaS applications at scale, OR successfully leading the transformation of on-premise/hosted solutions to SaaS delivery models
  • - **Engineering Leadership**: 8+ years in software engineering with at least 4 years in senior leadership roles managing multiple teams and engineering managers
  • - **Team Building**: Demonstrated success building, scaling, and developing high-performing engineering organisations of 30+ engineers
  • - **Technical Depth**: Strong technical foundation with hands-on experience in cloud platforms (Azure, AWS and/or GCP), modern development practices, and enterprise software architecture
  • - **Complex Migrations**: Experience managing large-scale platform migrations and customer transitions with minimal disruption
  • - **Quality Assurance**: Experience working with both in-house and outsourced QA teams, establishing quality engineering practices
  • - **Cloud Operations**: Understanding of SRE principles, Infrastructure as Code, and the evolution of operations teams in product-centric organisations
  • **Highly Desirable**
  • - Experience in highly regulated industries (education, financial services, healthcare) with compliance requirements
  • - Track record of integrating AI/ML capabilities into production software systems
  • - Experience with multi-cloud architectures and operations
  • - Background in enterprise software serving the education sector or similar mission-critical domains
  • - Experience with multi-region deployments and international customer bases
  • - Understanding of API-first architecture and platform ecosystem development
  • - Experience of AI development methodologies in legacy and new product development
  • **Leadership Qualities**
  • - **Strategic Thinking**: Ability to translate business strategy into executable engineering roadmaps
  • - **Change Leadership**: Proven ability to lead organisations through significant transformation while maintaining team morale and productivity
  • - **Stakeholder Management**: Excellent communication and relationship-building skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels
  • - **Data-Driven**: Uses metrics and evidence to drive decisions, measure progress, and demonstrate value
  • - **Customer Focus**: Deep commitment to delivering value to customers and understanding their needs
  • - **Collaboration**: Natural collaborator who builds trust across organisational boundaries
  • - **Resilience**: Comfortable with ambiguity and able to navigate complex technical and organisational challenges
  • - **Integrity**: Strong ethical foundation and commitment to doing what's right for customers, team, and company
Benefits
  • At Kinetic, we believe work should come with rewards that make a real difference. Here’s just a taste of what you can expect when you join us:
  • - 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) - with extra days the longer you’re with us
  • - Two paid wellbeing days each year, with a budget to enjoy some time out with someone important to you
  • - Enhanced pension contributions to support your future
  • - Two paid days a year to give back through volunteering, charity work, or sustainability projects with our Green Team
  • - Salary sacrifice schemes for electric vehicles and cycle-to-work
  • - 24/7 access to our Employee Assistance Programme for confidential advice and support
  • - A full annual health check to keep you at your best
  • - A flexible benefits platform - from life assurance and learning opportunities to retail discounts and cinema tickets
  • - A genuine people-first culture where your growth and wellbeing come first
  • - Performance-related bonus scheme to reward your contribution
  • - Regular socials - from team get-togethers to all-company celebrations, with each department owning a budget for their events
  • - The opportunity to attend group conferences, away days and learning forums both in the UK and abroad - network with other talent
  • We’ve created a welcoming office environment, with well-stocked kitchens offering free breakfast, fresh fruit, hot and cold drinks, and a range of tuck shop goodies to keep you fuelled throughout the day.

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard skills
SaaS applicationscloud platformsAzureAWSGCPInfrastructure as CodeAPI designAI Software EngineeringCI/CDautomated testing
Soft skills
strategic thinkingchange leadershipstakeholder managementdata-driven decision makingcustomer focuscollaborationresilienceintegrityteam buildingleadership