The Head of Engineering will define and drive the engineering strategy and culture at Foodhub, overseeing teams across the UK and India, ensuring system reliability, scalability, and the integration of AI technologies to meet business objectives while mentoring engineering talent.
Key Responsibilities:
Engineering Leadership & Strategy
- Define and own Foodhub's engineering strategy, technical roadmap, and architecture vision across all platforms — consumer app, restaurant partner portal, EPOS (Fusion), payments, and data.
- Drive a culture of engineering excellence: clean code, robust testing, CI/CD, observability, and on-call discipline.
- Lead the technical due diligence and decision-making for major architectural shifts (e.g., microservices migration, cloud infrastructure, real-time order tracking systems).
- Champion engineering best practices and ensure Foodhub's systems can scale from current volumes to 10x growth.
People & Team Building
- Lead, mentor, and grow engineering managers and senior engineers across UK and India — currently 250+ employees globally with significant engineering headcount.
- Own the full engineering hiring pipeline: define roles, assess talent, and build a world-class team.
- Create clear career progression frameworks and foster a high-ownership, low-hierarchy engineering culture.
- Bridge cultural and time-zone differences between our UK and India teams to create one unified, high-performing engineering organisation.
Delivery & Execution
- Partner with Product, Design, and Commercial teams to plan and execute quarterly engineering roadmaps.
- Ensure delivery of high-impact initiatives: new market launches, product verticals (groceries, group ordering, table reservations), and platform performance improvements.
- Own engineering KPIs: deployment frequency, incident rate, system uptime (99.9%+ target), and time-to-market.
- Establish robust incident management and post-mortem culture to reduce system downtime and customer impact.
Platform & Infrastructure
- Oversee and evolve Foodhub's core tech stack — web platform, iOS and Android apps, Fusion EPOS software, APIs, and payment integrations.
- Drive cloud infrastructure strategy (AWS), ensuring security, scalability, and cost efficiency.
- Lead adoption of AI/ML capabilities: personalised recommendations, demand forecasting, fraud detection, and intelligent delivery routing.
- Ensure GDPR compliance, data security, and PCI-DSS standards across all engineering systems.
Stakeholder & Executive Engagement
- Act as the primary engineering voice in the leadership team — translating technical complexity into clear business outcomes.
- Represent Foodhub engineering externally: conferences, hiring events, and partner/vendor relationships.
Requirements
What You'll Bring
Essential Experience
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4-5 years in senior engineering leadership (Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, or Engineering Director).
- Proven track record of leading and scaling distributed engineering teams of 50+ engineers across multiple locations.
- Deep hands-on technical background in backend engineering, distributed systems, and mobile platforms (iOS/Android).
- Experience in a consumer-facing marketplace, e-commerce, food tech, or logistics platform at scale.
- Strong understanding of microservices architecture, cloud-native infrastructure, real-time data pipelines, and API-first design.
- Demonstrated success in hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineering talent.
- Strong commercial instinct — ability to balance engineering quality with speed to market.
Highly Desirable
- Experience working in a challenger/scale-up environment
- Familiarity with EPOS/POS systems, payment gateway integrations, or restaurant technology.
- Experience leading offshore or near-shore engineering teams, particularly in India.
- Hands-on experience with AI/ML product features in consumer apps — recommendation engines, search ranking, dynamic pricing, and personalisation at scale.
- Practical experience integrating and shipping AI-powered features using LLMs (such as Claude, GPT, or Gemini), including prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, and responsible AI deployment in production environments.
- Familiarity with AI developer tooling and emerging standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot), and agentic workflows — with the ability to champion their adoption across engineering teams.
- Track record of driving engineering culture transformation and introducing modern DevOps/engineering practices, including establishing AI-augmented development workflows as a core part of the engineering culture.
What Success Looks Like — First 12 Months
- 0–3 months: Deep understanding of Foodhub's codebase, infrastructure, team capabilities, and delivery bottlenecks. Trust built with engineering teams in UK and India.
- 3–6 months: Clear technical roadmap in place. Quick wins delivered. Engineering team structure reviewed and optimised. Key hires made.
- 6–12 months: Measurable improvement in system reliability, deployment speed, and engineering team satisfaction. At least one major platform initiative launched (e.g., new market, product vertical, or infrastructure upgrade).
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