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Spendesk is an AI-powered spend management and procurement platform trusted by thousands of finance teams across Europe. As Head of Engineering, you will lead a complete engineering group of 20-30 people spread across Europe, managing 2-4 Engineering Managers and reporting directly to the CTO. You'll set technical and organisational direction, build and develop your leadership team, and be accountable for delivery, reliability, economics, and pace.
Key responsibilities include:
**Technical & Organisational Strategy**: Define multi-quarter technical and organisational strategy aligned with company goals. Drive architectural decisions, simplification, and domain clarity. Make build vs. buy vs. partner decisions and own your group's AI/tooling strategy. Own area economics including cost-to-serve, infrastructure efficiency, and hiring ROI with clear quarterly visibility.
**Delivery & Operations**: Be accountable for delivery and outcomes across your portfolio of squads, balancing competing priorities without compromising quality. Establish group-level KPIs, SLOs, and operating rhythms. Champion end-to-end observability, sensible on-call practices, and postmortems that drive change. Sequence hiring and headcount to maximise impact.
**Leadership Team Building**: Hire, develop, and retain a strong, balanced leadership team of Engineering Managers, Senior EMs, and Staff Engineers. Coach managers through difficult decisions. Lead performance calibration and make final calls on promotions and compensation. Build succession plans for key roles and actively invest in retaining top talent.
**Cross-functional Influence**: Represent Engineering in company-wide forums, partnering with Product, Design, Data, and customer-facing teams. Communicate strategy and trade-offs clearly to engineers and executives. Champion diversity and inclusion in hiring and development.
You'll be based in one of Spendesk's offices (Paris, London, or Barcelona) with a flexible on-site rhythm agreed with your team.
**Requirements**:
- 8+ years in software engineering with increasing scope, including 3+ years managing managers (Team Leads/EMs)
- Track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder programmes in product-led SaaS on time, on budget, with measurable results
- Fintech, payments, or compliance experience is a strong plus
- Hands-on experience operating distributed systems at scale in production
- Sufficient technical depth to earn credibility with individual contributors and team leads (can read and question code)
- Comfort with the stack: TypeScript, Node, React, AWS
- Business acumen: can discuss unit economics, ROI, and trade-offs fluently
- Genuine track record of growing managers into better managers, not just engineers into better engineers
