Engineering Director

Omnea; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

UK Benefits Package

US Benefits Package

Job summary

Omnea, the UK’s #1 startup in 2026, is seeking a Director of Engineering to join our leadership team and report to the CTO. You’ll oversee multiple engineering managers and teams, owning the technical direction and delivery outcomes for a broad product area.

You’ll scale an engineering function as we grow to hundreds of enterprise customers, partnering with Product and R&D to ship high-impact software with autonomy and a strong focus on reliability and performance.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in leadership.
• 2+ years managing managers (Engineering Managers/Team Leads).
• Led 25–50 engineers across multiple teams.
• Experience at Series A+ B2B SaaS companies.
• Strong background in distributed systems and cloud architecture (AWS).
• Experience with TypeScript, React, AWS Serverless is a plus.
• Proven track record delivering multi-team programs impacting product adoption and revenue.
• Data-driven, able to influence without authority.

Responsibilities

• Hire, coach, and develop Engineering Managers and Team Leads.
• Set high performance bar and manage leveling across the group.
• Own org design for the area and headcount planning.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap with Product leadership.
• Balance debt, features, and reliability while defending trade-offs to execs.
• Ensure customer feedback drives technical priorities with enterprise engagements.

Job description

Our Mission At Omnea, we’re reinventing how enterprise businesses operate, starting with the most painful parts:

Our Mission At Omnea, we’re reinventing how enterprise businesses operate, starting with the most painful parts: procurement – where a single purchase can drag on for months, trigger 50+ emails, and pull in Finance, Legal, Security, and IT just to get something approved.

We’ve raised $75M from Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, and Accel to change that. Our AI-native platform connects every person, step, and system so buying is fast, safe, and efficient – one place to request, automated approvals and renewals, real‑time supplier risk, and complete spend visibility.

The opportunity is massive. Every enterprise on the planet has this problem and nobody has solved it. We’ve 10x’d ARR to double‑digit millions in 18 months and are trusted by global enterprises like Spotify, MongoDB, Monzo, and Albertsons. We’re now the 4th fastest growing startup in Europe & the Sunday Times' #1 Best Medium Sized Tech Company To Work for.

Our team previously scaled Tessian (cybersecurity tech, backed by Sequoia, Balderton, Accel, acquired post-Series C), and our team includes ex‑founders operators who’ve grown unicorns, shipped world‑class products, and executed at the highest levels. You’ll work alongside leaders like Ben, Abs, Sabrina, and Rebe.

Find out more about the team and life at Omnea here.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for an ambitious and talented Director of Engineering to join Omnea, the UK's #1 Startup in 2026, as a senior member of our Engineering leadership team. You'll report directly to our CTO, Dhruv Kumar, who joined us from Voy and has scaled engineering organizations at Hopin, Charlotte Tilbury, and THG.

This is a manager‑of‑managers role. You'll lead a group of Engineering Managers and Team Leads: 25-50 engineers across several teams. You'll own the outcomes, org design, and technical direction of a significant slice of the product.

As we grow from tens to hundreds of enterprise customers and through 10x revenue growth in the next 2-3 years, you'll play a crucial role in building the best Engineering function in its category. You'll operate with high autonomy, partnering with the CTO, Product leadership, and your peers across R&D to turn strategy into shipped software.

What You’ll Do

Build and lead the leaders

• Hire, coach, and develop Engineering Managers and Team Leads. Your primary output is their effectiveness, not your own.
• Set and hold a high performance bar across the group, including the harder calls on performance and leveling.
• Own org design for your area: how teams are shaped, sized, and split as the product and company grow.
• Build the bench: identify and grow the next generation of engineering leaders at Omnea.
• Own the headcount plan for your group, from business case through to hiring.

Own Delivery At Group Scale

• Be accountable for the outcomes of several teams at once, not the output of any one of them.
• Create the operating rhythm (planning, prioritization, and reporting) that keeps a multi‑team group moving quickly and predictably.
• Unblock at the seams: the cross‑team dependencies, ambiguous ownership, and architectural decisions that no single team can resolve.
• Ensure robust monitoring, observability, and incident response across your area.

Shape Technical And Product Strategy

• Partner with the CTO and Product leadership to define and execute the technical roadmap for your domain.
• Make the build/buy, architecture, and technical investment calls that shape the platform for years, and bring the rest of R&D with you.
• Balance technical debt, feature development, and reliability, and be able to defend those trade‑offs to the exec team.
• Ensure customer feedback drives technical priorities, including direct time with enterprise customers.

Teams And Products You Might End Up Working On

• Accounting and Goods Receipting – ensuring procurement and finance teams have the right information and tools to operate accurately, automatically, and at scale.
• Insights and Reporting – deep, complex custom visualizations bringing together AI and data to surface meaningful insights and context across the platform.
• Sourcing – building the tools that find the right suppliers, shape the right deals, and make sure the best option is already in play before a request is even created.
• Workflow Orchestration – the configurable backbone of our systems that accurately model company operations, underpinning a single source of truth.
• And many more areas we’re actively starting or expanding upon!

About You

Leadership Experience

• You have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership.
• You have 2+ years managing managers, having hired, coached, and where necessary, performance‑managed Engineering Managers or Team Leads.
• You've led a group of 25-50 engineers across multiple teams and owned the org design for it.
• You've demonstrated success in fast‑moving, ambiguous environments, particularly in rapid‑growth periods.
• Ideally, you've done this at more than one company, including at least one successful Series A+ B2B SaaS company.

Technical Excellence

• Strong technical background with hands‑on experience in modern web technologies.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud architecture (preferably AWS), and scalability challenges.
• Experience with our stack (TypeScript, React, AWS Serverless) is a plus, but not required.

Track Record Of Impact

• Strong track record of delivering complex, multi‑team programs that moved company outcomes: product adoption, revenue, and customer retention.
• Proven history of improving team velocity and quality at the group level, not just within a single team.
• Experience scaling an engineering organization through a period of rapid growth and adapting the structure as it grew.
• Experience implementing engineering processes that scale effectively at pace.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers and translating their needs into technical solutions.

Leadership Style

• You're data‑driven but know when to trust intuition.
• You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, and owning them when they don't land.
• You excel at influence without authority, across Product, Design, GTM, and the exec team.
• You have a track record of growing and developing engineering leaders, as well as engineers at all levels (Senior, Staff, Principal).
• You stay close enough to the technology to be credible with senior engineers without taking the work off them.

Nice To Haves That Really Stand Out To Us

• Track record of successful product launches in B2B SaaS.
• Experience with procurement/finance systems.
• History of contributions to engineering communities.

You can learn more about Engineering at Omnea and our hiring process via our R&D Candidate Hub here.

At Omnea, we embrace diversity. To build a product that's loved by everyone, we're best served by a team with all sorts of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't quite match the full job spec! And regardless of your race, religion, colour, gender, or anything else! If you think you could be a good fit for Omnea, please reach out.

A Few Things To Note

• We offer competitive geo‑localised benefits, and you can check out our UK Benefits Package here and our US Benefits Package here.
• We work Tuesdays, Wednesdays & Thursdays in‑person at our offices. At this early stage of our company life‑cycle it's important to us that we get this together‑time, and you can read more about why we believe this is a winning move here
• We're commercial, ambitious and we don't pretend otherwise! We're actively seeking folks looking to make the most of a career‑defining opportunity, with the hunger to be part of building something really impressive. You can see our values here and our Omnea Future Founder's fund here!
• We sometimes use AI note‑takers to help us transcribe interview notes, so we can be more present in your interview. If you'd like to opt out of us using automatic transcribers, please note this in the free text field in your application, otherwise we'll take your application as confirmation that you're happy for us to use notetakers (whether added to video calls or in the background).

We are proud to be recognised for both our culture and product, and we are just getting started. Join us as we grow!