Director, MTA Engineering

Mimecast; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 124,000 - 186,000; Full time

Job summary

Mimecast in London is seeking a senior leader to own the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) engineering organisation, responsible for delivery, quality, and scale. You will guide managers, set standards, and drive strategic initiatives for a globally distributed platform processing over 1.7 billion emails daily.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will balance engineering rigor with rapid delivery, champion AI-enabled development, and collaborate with product, security, and operations to meet

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience with progressive engineering leadership responsibilities.
• 5+ years in engineering management, including experience leading other engineering managers (second-line leadership or above).
• Proven track record of leading multi-team engineering organisations, with sustained improvements in execution quality, team health, and organisational capability.
• Strong record of translating business strategy into engineering plans and representing engineering credibly to VP and C-suite stakeholders.
• Background in high-availability, mission-critical distributed systems — sufficient to lead credibly and make informed investment decisions alongside senior technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own the Organisation: Lead a multi-squad engineering organisation with full accountability for delivery outcomes, team health, and engineering culture. Own organisational design — squad structure, reporting lines, and capacity — ensuring they remain fit for purpose as the business evolves.
• Lead Leaders: Build, coach, and develop your Engineering Managers and leads. Hold them accountable for delivery and people outcomes. Build a strong leadership team with clear succession planning for key leadership and senior technical roles.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Set and maintain high standards across your squads: testing, observability, release governance, incident response, and secure development practices. Hold the organisation accountable for operational excellence on a zero-downtime, globally distributed platform — including post-incident learning and continuous reliability improvement.
• Own Technical Strategy: Translate product and business strategy into multi-quarter engineering plans. Serve as the senior engineering authority for MTA in executive-level forums — including roadmap planning, major incident response, and strategic investment decisions.
• Champion AI-Augmented Development: Drive adoption of AI development tools across your teams. Establish governance for responsible AI usage and measure productivity impact. Lead by example in building an AI-enabled engineering culture.
• Stakeholder Management: Partner with Product Management, Security, and Operations leadership to align priorities, resolve cross-organisational dependencies, and ensure the roadmap reflects business-critical needs. Represent engineering at VP and C-suite level, articulating capacity constraints, delivery risks, and investment trade-offs clearly.
• Operational Accountability: Own the reliability and performance of the MTA platform. Our infrastructure processes over 1.7 billion emails daily — you will ensure robust monitoring, incident response, post-incident learning, and continuous reliability improvement.
• People Leadership: Drive hiring strategy — including levelling decisions and interview standards. Identify and grow high-potential talent with deliberate development paths. Manage budget and headcount for your engineering segment with accurate forecasting. Monitor and respond decisively to engagement, attrition, and performance signals.

Skills

Software development

Engineering management

Multi‑team leadership

Translating strategy into plans

High availability systems

Software engineer background

AI tool adoption

Education

Engineering or Computer Science degree

Job description

About Mimecast

Mimecast is a leading cybersecurity company that helps organizations protect their people, data, and communications from today's most sophisticated threats. With over 42,000 customers worldwide, we analyze more than 18 billion security events daily to stop attacks before they cause harm.

We are pioneers in Human Risk Management, recognizing that people are both an organization's greatest asset and its most significant security vulnerability. Our platform addresses the human element of cybersecurity by combining advanced threat detection, awareness training, and Incydr risk management to reduce the likelihood and impact of human‑caused security incidents.

AI-First Engineering at Mimecast

Mimecast is an AI‑First engineering organization. Our teams actively leverage AI‑powered development tools to accelerate innovation, improve code quality, and solve complex cybersecurity challenges at scale. We're looking for engineering leaders who embrace these technologies or are eager to master them quickly.

Our AI leadership extends beyond how we build to what we build. Our Mihra AI agent delivers 7x faster threat response for customers, and we're recognized as "Agents of Change" in Human Risk Management. Engineers here work at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI tooling and AI‑powered security products that protect organizations worldwide.

Lead MTA Engineering at Mimecast

This is a senior leadership role at the heart of Mimecast’s Email Security platform. Our MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) is the mission‑critical infrastructure processing over 1.7 billion emails every day for more than 42,000 enterprise customers worldwide — and keeping it fast, reliable, and secure is non‑negotiable.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will lead a multi‑squad engineering organisation within the Email & Collaboration Security group, with full accountability for delivery outcomes, engineering quality, and organisational health. You lead through managers and senior technical staff — setting direction, building leaders, and creating the conditions for sustained high performance.

This is not a role for someone who just wants to manage day‑to‑day work. You will own organisational strategy, engineering standards, and the conditions that make reliable delivery possible at massive scale. We operate with urgency: cyber threats don’t wait, and neither do we. You will instil that same mindset across your leadership team.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Organisation: Lead a multi‑squad engineering organisation with full accountability for delivery outcomes, team health, and engineering culture. Own organisational design — squad structure, reporting lines, and capacity — ensuring they remain fit for purpose as the business evolves.
• Lead Leaders: Build, coach, and develop your Engineering Managers and leads. Hold them accountable for delivery and people outcomes. Build a strong leadership team with clear succession planning for key leadership and senior technical roles.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Set and maintain high standards across your squads: testing, observability, release governance, incident response, and secure development practices. Hold the organisation accountable for operational excellence on a zero‑downtime, globally distributed platform — including post‑incident learning and continuous reliability improvement.
• Own Technical Strategy: Translate product and business strategy into multi‑quarter engineering plans. Serve as the senior engineering authority for MTA in executive‑level forums — including roadmap planning, major incident response, and strategic investment decisions.
• Champion AI‑Augmented Development: Drive adoption of AI development tools across your teams. Establish governance for responsible AI usage and measure productivity impact. Lead by example in building an AI‑enabled engineering culture.
• Stakeholder Management: Partner with Product Management, Security, and Operations leadership to align priorities, resolve cross‑organisational dependencies, and ensure the roadmap reflects business‑critical needs. Represent engineering at VP and C‑suite level, articulating capacity constraints, delivery risks, and investment trade‑offs clearly.
• Operational Accountability: Own the reliability and performance of the MTA platform. Our infrastructure processes over 1.7 billion emails daily — you will ensure robust monitoring, incident response, post‑incident learning, and continuous reliability improvement.
• People Leadership: Drive hiring strategy — including levelling decisions and interview standards. Identify and grow high‑potential talent with deliberate development paths. Manage budget and headcount for your engineering segment with accurate forecasting. Monitor and respond decisively to engagement, attrition, and performance signals.

What You’ll Bring

• 8+ years of software development experience with progressive engineering leadership responsibilities.
• 5+ years in engineering management, including experience leading other engineering managers (second‑line leadership or above).
• Proven track record of leading multi‑team engineering organisations, with sustained improvements in execution quality, team health, and organisational capability.
• Strong record of translating business strategy into engineering plans and representing engineering credibly to VP and C‑suite stakeholders.
• Background in high‑availability, mission‑critical distributed systems — sufficient to lead credibly and make informed investment decisions alongside senior technical stakeholders.
• Prior experience as a software engineer, providing a credible technical foundation for leading deep engineering teams.
• Experience navigating large‑scale organisational change — team growth, restructuring, culture transformation, or delivery model shifts.
• Excellent collaboration, influencing, coaching, mentoring, and communication skills. A track record of building and sustaining high‑performance engineering cultures following transformation or growth periods.
• Continuous learning mindset, keeping abreast of relevant industry technologies, tools, and standards.

AI Fluency

As we build an AI‑First engineering culture, we expect engineering leaders to champion and model AI‑augmented development:

• Demonstrated experience with AI‑powered development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, or similar assistants, OR
• Strong enthusiasm and commitment to rapidly adopting AI tools and driving their adoption across your teams.

You will be expected to lead by example, integrating AI tools into your leadership practices and establishing strategies for AI adoption across your engineering teams.

Nice To Have

• Highly desirable: Experience in email security, messaging infrastructure, or cybersecurity product development. Experience with email protocols (SMTP, IMAP), authentication standards (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), or threat detection systems.
• Experience leading engineering transformation or platform decomposition initiatives.
• Background in SaaS product development with multi‑tenant architecture.
• Engineering or Computer Science degree.

Location

This role is based in London. You will lead teams located in London and Bangalore but collaborate with teams located globally. This is a hybrid role with a minimum of two days a week on site in our London office.

What We Bring

Join our team to accelerate your career journey, working with cutting‑edge technologies and contributing to projects that have real customer impact. You will be immersed in a dynamic environment that recognizes and celebrates your achievements.

Mimecast offers formal and ‘on the job’ learning opportunities, maintains a comprehensive benefits package that helps our employees and their family members to sustain a healthy lifestyle, and importantly - working in cross functional teams to build your knowledge!

Our Hybrid Model:

• Fosters a culture of collaboration, communication, performance and learning.
• Drives innovation and creativity within and between teams.
• Introduces employees to priorities outside of their immediate realm.
• Ensures important interpersonal relationships and connections with one another and our community!

The base salary range for this position is £124,000−£186,000 plus benefits. This range represents the minimum and maximum new hire compensation for this role. The position may also be eligible for incentive plans and additional benefits, in accordance with company policy and local regulations. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location with individual compensation also dependent on factors such as qualifications, experience, and skills. Final offers will reflect these considerations and may vary accordingly.

Belonging at Mimecast

Cybersecurity is a community effort. That’s why we’re committed to building an inclusive, diverse community that celebrates and welcomes everyone – unless they’re a cybercriminal, of course.

We’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Aff…?

We consider everyone equally: your race, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, marital status, nationality, or any other protected characteristic won’t affect your application.

Due to certain obligations to our customers, an offer of employment will be subject to your successful completion of applicable background checks, conducted in accordance with local law.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment.