Head of Engineering - 6-Month Contract – Outside IR35

Role Overview

A market-leading enterprise software provider is undergoing a major 18–24 month transformation. They are seeking a strategic Head of Engineering to lead the core product organisation through a pivotal shift from legacy/hosted solutions to a modern, multi-tenant SaaS delivery model and AI-enabled roadmap.

The Logistics

• Duration: 6-month initial contract.
• Location: Buckinghamshire/Bedfordshire
• Requirement: circa 1 day a week on-site, however flexible
• Rate: Negotiable

Responsibilities

Team Leadership

• Engineering Management: Mentor and lead engineering managers and tech leads across multiple product squads. Foster a culture of high performance, quality, and customer-centricity.
• Talent & Growth: Refine the engineering career framework and drive hiring strategies to meet SaaS and AI transformation goals.
• QA & Delivery: Manage the relationship with an outsourced QA partner, ensuring SLAs and quality metrics align with agile delivery cadences.
• SRE Transition: Lead the evolution of traditional Cloud Ops into a product-aligned Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) function, championing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and AI-driven automated provisioning.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Partner with the CTO, Product Management, and Sales to ensure engineering output matches commercial priorities and security-by-design principles.

Technical Strategy

• Provide the architectural vision for the shift to multi-tenant SaaS, microservices, and API-first design.
• Guide the engineering practices required to embed AI/ML capabilities across the product portfolio, ensuring ethical and regulatory standards
• Oversee the technical roadmap for moving existing clients to the new platform, ensuring data integrity and backward compatibility.
• Standards & Compliance: Maintain rigorous standards for code quality and security, ensuring the platform remains compliant with ISO27001 and industry-specific regulations.

Required Experience

• SaaS: A proven record of leading engineering teams through a transition from on-prem/hosted models to enterprise-scale SaaS.
• Senior Leadership: 8+ years in software engineering, with at least 4 years in a senior leadership role (Head of/VP) managing 30+ engineers and multiple managers.
• Cloud & Architecture: Strong technical depth in Azure, AWS, or GCP, and modern microservices architecture.
• Operational Maturity: Understanding of SRE principles, CI/CD pipelines, and observability in a multi-region environment.