We are on the hunt for an progressive Head of Engineering, with a strong background in software engineering and architecture and management, to take a leading role within our Engineering team. 

About us

At AM, our engineers are helping to turn primary sources into digital adventures, unveiling the mysteries of hidden voices. We create solutions that empower AM's editorial teams and our SaaS customers to manage and present fascinating historic materials, and help students and researchers to explore and share historical information from physical archives.

Engineering at AM is dynamic and progressive, and requires high standards. We value agility - adapting, learning, and iterating swiftly.

Our engineers work in small, cross-functional, autonomous teams alongside product managers and designers, collaborating with other teams across our organisation. We use continuous delivery techniques and DevOps practices to enable us to sustainably deliver at speed, while encouraging healthy and happy teams. 

We need an expert engineering leader who understands the importance of team culture and technical excellence, and who can coach and nurture success across multiple teams and programmes of work. 

About the role

As our Head of Engineering you will bring together strategy, software architecture, and leadership. You will be highly autonomous, self motivated, and organised. 

In your role you will:

• Work closely with the department leadership in managing the engineering capability of the business. 
• Take ownership of engineering practices and delivery of solutions.
• Work closely with the senior leadership from across the business to shape and guide the overarching technology vision and strategy.
• Line manage a number of individual contributors and leads from multiple engineering disciplines. Managing managers, and working across multiple distributed engineering teams.
• Work with teams to architect viable solutions that are aligned with the technology vision and strategy, and supporting them in producing and maintaining effective delivery plans.
• Work closely with wider business stakeholders, especially product managers, to support the discovery process.
• Participate in the departmental leadership alongside other senior department team members.

Day to day, the Head of Engineering can expect to either be working alongside one or more of their Lead Engineers to support the design and planning processes. Or they may be “zooming out”, participating in prototyping, strategic planning, coaching, product discovery etc.

As a senior member of the department you will be expected to identify how to execute your work, and how to adapt your role to suit the evolving needs of the business.

We will be recruiting on a hybrid working basis. However, face-to-face collaboration is important to us. You should expect to travel to our head office in Marlborough regularly. Sometimes we collaborate in other locations, so UK and overseas travel will be necessary from time to time.

Who we seek

We're looking for a Head of Engineering who:

• Values, understands and encourages collaborative ways of working, from solution design to coding and testing, and is an excellent communicator.
• Is passionate about continuously learning and finding new and interesting ways to improve both our technology and team effectiveness.
• Loves the journey at least as much as the destination - understanding and embracing the work required to realise our vision.
• Is resilient and adaptable, and embraces the freedom and responsibility of autonomy.
• Understands the importance of servant leadership and a coaching mindset in cultivating empowerment, as well as the dynamics of managing managers.
• Has a deep understanding of progressive delivery including Continuous Discovery and Continuous Deployment, as well as Agile, Lean, DevOps, and project management. 
• Has a solid understanding of web application security, and application resilience.
• Loves excellent software architecture, and pursues this with profound interest.
• Has significant experience architecting and building web applications with a similar tech stack, cloud infrastructure, and deployment techniques to us (no, you don't need to tick all the boxes).

Our perfect candidate will be:

bold - Putting their ideas forwards and try new things even if they fail.

distinctive - Rebelling in the name of healthy debate, pushing boundaries in the name of better quality.

honest - Being open about successes as well as failures, ready to give and receive feedback.

accountable - Proactively taking responsibility for outcomes, driven to succeed

Our technology

Our core tech stack right now is .Net, React, AWS and Azure. Our platform uses a microservice architecture. We use GitHub Actions for CI and Kubernetes for our container orchestration. We maintain applications and components that leverage a great number of technologies.

Our stack and toolkit is not fixed. Our teams are empowered and expected to chart their course and find the right solution for each problem.

Our offering

• A highly progressive, innovative, and flexible environment in which each team member can genuinely impact success
• 5% minimum time allocation for training, Pluralsight, and other tailored training opportunities
• A very competitive salary, and the opportunity to continuously grow and develop your career.
• A hybrid, flexible working environment where you can plan your week to allow for work-life balance and that will allow you to work from home at least on three days weekly.

You can read more about our complete benefits package here.

Find out more & apply

You can read more about life in our engineering teams in our Playbook. And you can read about engineering leadership in our Engineering Leadership Manifesto.

You can read about what success in the role and progression looks like in our published progression & competency framework.

You can found out more about life at AM on our careers site.

And there's loads more detail in the job description and application packs we send out to applicants.