This is a hands-on leadership role that combines organisational ownership of the Software Development function with technical direction-setting across systems and platforms. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will lead 6 engineering teams (~20 engineers) through their Team Leads as your direct reports, and act as a peer to Product and Operations leadership.
The role is designed for someone who has led engineering organisations before, who treats engineering as a discipline worth investing in, and who combines strong people leadership with the technical depth to own architectural decisions across the platform.
You'll be joining a progressive and motivated environment focused on ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the Software Development function end-to-end: organisational design, headcount planning, hiring, budget, and performance, with 6 Team Leads as direct reports.
- Lead, develop, and grow Team Leads: build a strong leadership bench so the organisation can scale without bottlenecking on you.
- Own architecture decisions across systems, services, integrations, and platforms (including system design, data architecture, and API/integration patterns), ensuring consistency and long-term scalability.
- Define and maintain architecture principles, standards, and reference designs; lead architecture reviews and drive complex solutioning where needed.
- Drive build-vs-buy decisions and technical debt strategy, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term platform health.
- Own engineering delivery outcomes across all teams: predictability, quality, throughput, and time-to-market; partner with Product on roadmap planning and prioritisation.
- Own the engineering operating model: sprint lifecycle, release management, quality control and evolve our sprint delivery metrics framework.
- Improve engineering efficiency by evolving processes, workflows, and governance, aligned with Wattstor's quality and security standards.
- Lead Wattstor's AI transformation in Technology: establish responsible AI-assisted development practices and integrate AI into engineering workflows where it earns its place.
- Act as a peer to Product, Operations, and Commercial leadership; communicate engineering progress, investment needs, and risk clearly to the CTO and executive team.
Tech / Environment You'll Lead
- Languages: Python across both edge and cloud (backend services, APIs, and Python edge runtime); TypeScript / React on the frontend.
- Cloud: AWS (ECS, Lambda, IoT Core, Greengrass), provisioned via Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).
- Data: PostgreSQL, InfluxDB, Amazon Timestream, DynamoDB (relational, time-series, and NoSQL workloads).
- Observability: Grafana, CloudWatch, Sentry.
- Ways of working: Agile with hybrid delivery (sprints for software, waterfall for operations).
