Director of AI-Powered Engineering

Swap; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Swap is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the Agentic Commerce team, steering AI-powered, high-velocity software delivery at scale. You will partner with Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams to prioritize work, while hands-on involvement ensures pragmatic execution and architectural integrity.

You’ll drive a culture of ownership, foster talent growth, and maintain engineering best practices across design, testing, and deployment in a fast-paced startup/scale-up setting.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership or management role.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with Product and Commercial teams.
• Comfortable contributing hands-on when needed.
• Experience in startup/scale-up environments.
• Hands-on experience with agentic/LLM-powered systems or AI-driven workflows.
• Strong background in distributed systems and cloud-native architecture; GCP a plus.
• Background in ecommerce/fintech or high-growth product domains.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow and inspire a team of engineers on the Agentic Commerce team, creating ownership and high performance.
• Drive end-to-end SDLC execution from discovery to delivery and iteration.
• Embed AI-first thinking to automate processes and accelerate development cycles.
• Align roadmaps with Product, Engineering, and Commercial leadership.
• Define and uphold engineering best practices across code quality and deployment.
• Foster continuous improvement through retrospectives and addressing bottlenecks.
• Stay close to JavaScript ecosystem to inform technical direction.

Skills

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Hands-on engineering

AI-first mindset

Talent recruitment

Tools

GCP

Job description

Swap is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the Agentic Commerce team, steering AI-powered, high-velocity software delivery at scale. You will partner with Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams to prioritize work, while hands-on involvement ensures pragmatic execution and architectural integrity.

You’ll drive a culture of ownership, foster talent growth, and maintain engineering best practices across design, testing, and deployment in a fast-paced startup/scale-up setting.