Head of Engineering

Xact Placements; England; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading cybersecurity scale-up in the UK is seeking a Head of Applications to manage a global engineering team. This key leadership position involves shaping engineering culture, driving technical excellence, and building enterprise-level SaaS solutions. With a strong focus on remote and hybrid work, this role offers competitive compensation and the opportunity for significant career progression within a fast-growing environment.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Key leadership opportunities

Endless career progression

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in engineering leadership.
• Proven track record of managing high-performing teams.
• Strong technical knowledge across multiple technology stacks.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a global application engineering team.
• Build critical SaaS capabilities for enterprise clients.
• Drive a high-performance engineering culture.

Skills

Building and managing distributed engineering teams

Enterprise-grade SaaS applications

Backend development: Node.js, Typescript

Frontend development: React.js, Typescript

Cloud technologies: AWS, ECS, K8s

Understanding SaaS fundamentals

Tools

MySQL

Airflow

Kafka

Job description

| Global Leadership Role | High-Growth Cybersecurity Scale-Up | UK (Hybrid / Remote)

This is an unmissable opportunity to join one of the fastest-scaling cybersecurity innovators on the market. Recognised by Gartner, backed by top-tier VC investors, and trusted by Fortune 500s and critical infrastructure providers, this scale-up is building the future of continuous offensive security.

They’re now seeking an ambitious Head of Applications to lead their global Application Technology team across the UK, Singapore, and the US. This is a high-impact leadership role where you’ll shape engineering culture, drive technical excellence, and scale customer-facing SaaS systems used by some of the largest enterprises in the world.

What you’ll be doing :

• Leading and growing a global application engineering team, spanning backend and frontend systems
• Building critical SaaS capabilities for enterprise clients: account lifecycle, access control, notifications, logging, multi-tenancy, and more
• Partnering with local leads to ensure global alignment and consistent delivery standards
• Driving a high-performance engineering culture through structured reviews, coaching, and career development pathways
• Partnering with Product Design to deliver intuitive, robust enterprise workflows
• Tackling complex technical challenges across large-scale data pipelines, secure access, event-driven systems, and multi-tenant architectures
• Embedding Agile, DevOps, and best practices into the engineering organisation

What they’re looking for :

• 10+ years of experience building and managing distributed engineering teams across multiple regions
• Proven track record as a global leader, managing local leads and scaling high-performing teams
• Experience delivering enterprise-grade SaaS applications in a high-growth B2B environment
• Strong technical depth across:
  • Backend: Node.js, Typescript
  • Frontend: React.js, Typescript
  • Database: MySQL
  • Cloud / Infra: AWS, ECS, K8s, Airflow, Kafka, Serverless
• Solid understanding of SaaS fundamentals: onboarding, authentication, SSO, granular authorisation, multi-tenancy
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration, asynchronous tasks, and event-driven architecture
• Ideally, exposure to cybersecurity platforms or large-scale security data systems

Why join?

✅ Competitive compensation & benefits

✅ Key leadership role in a high-growth cybersecurity scale-up

✅ Opportunity to shape global engineering strategy and culture

✅ Work with cutting-edge technology solving complex, industry-wide challenges

✅ Endless career progression — growth and internal promotion are core to their DNA

This is a rare chance to lead a global engineering function at a company reshaping how the world’s biggest organisations stay ahead of attackers. If you’re a proven applications leader with SaaS and security experience — this one’s for you.

Apply now — your next big challenge starts here.