Head of Engineering

The Role: The Group Head of Engineering leads the group's engineering function: in-house engineers and specialist contractors who deliver projects, run client environments and staff the service desk, spread across seven hours of time difference from Central Europe to Central America. The role carries full responsibility for how engineering work is planned, delegated, delivered and documented, and for raising the technical standard of the team. The group is growing, and the role is expected to build an engineering organisation that scales with it: one that delivers on time, runs on clear ownership, and uses AI and automation as a normal part of daily work. The role reports to the Group Managing Director and works closely with sales and pre-sales on solution design and bids. The role suits someone who genuinely enjoys infrastructure engineering, keeps up with technology out of interest, is still comfortable opening a console to understand a problem, and takes pride in environments that run quietly and well.

Responsibilities: Leadership and management Lead, organise and develop the engineering team across all locations, with clear ownership, delegation and accountability for every project and client environment. Plan resourcing and workload so that projects and client commitments are delivered on time, and report progress, risks and slippage early and honestly. Run a working rhythm suited to a distributed team: clean handovers across time zones, written documentation as the default, regular one-to-ones and team reviews. Hire, onboard and develop engineers in several countries, manage performance, and build a layer of team leads who can run work without constant escalation. Travel to team locations and client sites as needed, including the United States, Costa Rica, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland. Engineering and service delivery Set and enforce engineering standards: reference architectures, build standards, change and release management, patching, backup and recovery testing, and security baselines. Act as the senior technical authority and final escalation point for complex incidents and designs. Lead the technical delivery of transformation projects, including IT separations (carve-outs), data centre and cloud migrations, and new-site build-outs. Own service quality against SLAs for the service desk and managed services. Own the engineering side of the group’s management systems and their audits, currently ISO 9001 and ISO/IEC 27001. AI and automation Use AI assistants and agents daily for scripting, automation, documentation, troubleshooting and analysis, and make this the normal way the team works. Replace repetitive manual work with automation and measure the effect on delivery time and margin. Set rules for AI use that keep client data protected and consistent with ISO/IEC 27001 and client contracts. Partners, clients and commercial Own the technical side of vendor partnerships, including the certification plan that keeps the group qualified for Microsoft Solutions Partner designations and other vendor programmes. Support pre-sales and tender work with solution designs, effort estimates and technical responses. Serve as senior technical contact for key clients, including regulated financial services firms and public-sector bodies. Keep engineering effort within budget and contribute to service pricing and margins.

Requirements: At least 10 years in IT infrastructure and systems engineering, including substantial time at a managed service provider or in a complex multi-site environment. A track record of leading engineering teams spread across countries and time zones, and of delivering projects on time through delegation rather than by doing the work personally. Deep expertise in the Microsoft platform (Azure