Head of Engineering (Hybrid)

Automation Consultants

Reading

Hybrid

GBP 110,000 - 120,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

33 days annual leave

Hybrid working and flexible hours

Private healthcare and dental insurance

Enhanced maternity and paternity

Personal training budget

Electric car scheme

Pension scheme

On-site gym and yoga

Job summary

Automation Consultants is seeking an Engineering Lead to direct the technical efforts at AppFox in Reading, UK. The role involves owning the engineering strategy, leading a team of 13 engineers, and ensuring high-quality delivery and innovation with AI integration.

The ideal candidate will possess profound leadership and software engineering experience, especially with AI tooling. The position offers competitive salary and comprehensive benefits, including hybrid working options and personal development budget.

Qualifications

Proven track record of leading and growing software engineering teams.
Experience with AI tooling and building AI-powered product features.
Strong grounding in full-stack development and cloud-native delivery.

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction and quality across engineering at AppFox.
Lead, coach and develop a team of engineers, focusing on growth.
Partner with product leadership to shape technical strategy.

Skills

Leadership

Software Engineering

AI Tooling

Stakeholder Communication

People Management

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Agile methodologies

Job description

Mission

You’ll own engineering at AppFox: the team, the technical direction, the quality bar and the pace of delivery. Reporting to the Head of Product, you’ll be the senior technical voice in the business, and you’ll carry real autonomy with it: defined authority across the technical, financial and quality aspects of engineering, and the trust to make high‑level calls within the company’s objectives.

Engineering Leadership & Technical Direction

Own the technical direction of AppFox’s products and the new application (architecture, standards and tooling) and evolve them as the business and the technology landscape move.
Bring breadth. Challenge how things are done today, introduce modern approaches and managed services where they earn their place, and make sure decisions are made on merit rather than habit.
Hold the quality bar high. Protect and extend the team’s DORA high‑performing practices (CI/CD, frequent small releases, strong review and testing discipline) without rebuilding what already works.
Own delivery: planning, prioritisation and predictable shipping, in close partnership with Product.
Be accountable for security, privacy and quality across the engineering org.

People & Leadership

Lead, coach and grow a team of 13 engineers, including two team leads and a layer of lead engineers.
Develop people deliberately, especially emerging leaders, creating space for them to grow rather than directing every outcome.
Own the people side fully: performance, development, hiring and the difficult conversations.
Build a culture of curiosity and outward‑looking engineering, including industry awareness, meetups, new ideas brought in from outside.

Strategy & Cross‑Functional

Partner closely with the Head of Product. Bring engineering reasoning to the table early and in the open, so decisions are made with shared understanding.
Shape technical strategy and the resourcing of the initiatives that matter most, and advise on what’s feasible, what it costs, and where technical investment pays back commercially.
Hold the senior relationships the role needs, across the business, and with Atlassian and monday.com on ecosystem direction.

AI – How We Build

This is the part we care most about, and it’s why this role looks different from the one we’d have written even a year ago. It comes in two halves, and we need both. The engineers who thrive over the next few years won’t treat AI as a novelty. They’ll use it as a force multiplier, and bring the rest of the team with them. You’ll set the standard: AI coding assistants and agentic development tooling (Claude Code, Cursor and the like) used daily and used well; AI‑assisted review, testing and the automation of routine engineering toil; small agentic workflows that take repetitive work off the team. At a higher level, you will consider how AI can be used in identifying and remediating bottlenecks, and project management.

AI – What We Build

Our products help teams govern, approve, optimise and manage content across Confluence, Jira, Miro and monday.com, and AI changes what those apps can do for customers. You’ll spot where AI adds genuine value across the portfolio – and, just as importantly, where it doesn’t, and lead the team to ship AI‑and‑LLM‑powered features that hold up in production: sound on evaluation, cost, latency and safety, not just impressive in a demo. You’ll also consider how external AI agents will affect our products and how the products should interact with them. Having built AI features yourself, or led teams that have, matters here. We don’t expect you to have every answer. We expect you to set the direction.

Profile

You get your energy from craft and from growing people — watching someone go from uncertain to confident.
You bring genuine breadth from real external experience. You’ve built software in different environments, stacks and teams, which is what lets you put real options on the table rather than one familiar path.
You’re a coach, not a director. You ask good questions, create space for the team to work things out, and build capability.
You genuinely enjoy senior leadership - the people complexity, the tough calls, the navigation. Not tolerate it; find it energising.
You’re comfortable with ambiguity, you bring the clarity to your own remit and get on with it.
You’re a thought partner. Handed a timeline, you don’t just nod and execute — you ask questions, bring trade‑offs, and say “we could also do this.”
You have emotional maturity and presence. You build trust quickly, listen before you change things, and are secure enough to disagree respectfully and move on.

Essential Skills

A Computer Science or other strongly numerate degree, 2:1 or above.
A proven track record of leading and growing software engineering teams, including direct people management through change. Non‑negotiable.
A broad hands‑on background across multiple stacks, companies and problem types.
Hands‑on experience using AI tooling to accelerate engineering work, with a real point of view on where the discipline is heading.
Experience building — or leading teams that have built — AI‑or‑LLM‑powered product features, with the judgement to know where AI earns its place.
Strong grounding in modern full‑stack development and cloud‑native delivery on AWS, with the CI/CD and agile practices that keep a team performing at a high level.
Enough technical credibility to challenge an architectural decision and be taken seriously. Breadth over depth, but real depth somewhere.
Excellent communication, and the presence to operate credibly with both the team and company leadership.

Nice to Have

Experience of the Atlassian and/or monday.com ecosystems — as a user, partner or vendor.
Experience shipping software via marketplaces (Atlassian Marketplace, monday.com Apps, and similar).
Hands‑on with agentic development tooling beyond chat (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP‑based workflows, and the like).
Experience taking AI features to production at scale: evaluation, cost control, latency, safety.

Salary

£110,000–£120,000, depending on experience.

Benefits