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Head of Engineering
About The National College
At The National College, we empower education professionals to transform children’s lives. Our all-in-one platform helps schools, trusts, and nurseries stay compliant, raise standards, and reduce staff workload through intuitive, impactful technology.
If educators need it, we build it.
We’ve created a unique platform that combines the world’s largest CPD and policy library with innovative software tools, developed in collaboration with thousands of schools and more than 1,000 education experts.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced, hands-on Head of Engineering to lead software delivery, technical execution, and engineering leadership across the business. This role is accountable for engineering strategy, delivery performance, technical quality, and team effectiveness across all product and platform codebases.
The Head of Engineering will lead internal engineering teams and external development partners, ensuring software is planned, prioritised, delivered, and continuously improved with high quality and predictability. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring strong technical judgement, delivery excellence, and the ability to build high-performing engineering teams.
Experience
- Significant senior engineering leadership experience in roles such as Engineering Manager, Head of Engineering, Engineering Director, VP Engineering, or equivalent
- Proven track record of leading software delivery across multiple teams, products, platforms, or complex codebases
- Demonstrated success managing diverse engineering organisations, including permanent employees, contractors, and external development partners
- Strong experience improving engineering delivery performance, including velocity, predictability, quality, and operational reliability
- Background in product-led, SaaS, or high-growth technology environments
- Proven ability to scale engineering teams and delivery capability during periods of business growth or transformation
Leadership & Delivery Capability
- Strong delivery mindset, with a clear focus on business outcomes over activity
- Exceptional execution capability, with the ability to drive alignment, accountability, and momentum across teams
- Strong people leadership skills, including coaching, performance management, and building high-performing teams
- Confident making prioritisation decisions in complex, fast-moving environments with competing demands
- Able to identify delivery risks, organisational bottlenecks, and execution blockers early, and resolve them pragmatically
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Technical & Commercial Capability
- Comfortable reviewing engineering output and challenging technical decisions, without needing to be the primary hands-on feature developer
- Able to introduce structure, governance, and process that improve delivery without creating unnecessary bureaucracy
- Data-driven approach to engineering leadership, using delivery, quality, utilisation, and reliability metrics to guide decisions
- Strong commercial judgement, balancing delivery speed, technical quality, scalability, and business risk
- Familiarity with modern SaaS architectures, cloud-native platforms, and contemporary engineering delivery practices
- Experience working in environments with customer-facing, operational, or uptime-critical systems
Stakeholder Management
- Excellent communication and influencing skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Comfortable operating at senior leadership level, providing clear visibility on delivery progress, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs
- Calm, credible, and decisive under pressure, with the ability to lead effectively in fast-paced environments
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience working with outsourced, offshore, or distributed engineering teams
- Exposure to formal delivery, quality, reliability, or engineering productivity frameworks and their practical application
Engineering Leadership & Delivery
- Lead engineering delivery across all product and platform codebases, ensuring teams consistently deliver high-quality, scalable, and reliable software aligned to business priorities
- Own engineering planning, prioritisation, estimation, and delivery commitments, creating a culture of accountability and predictable execution
- Drive delivery velocity and timely issue resolution while maintaining strong standards of quality, stability, and performance
- Ensure work is clearly scoped, well prioritised, and effectively owned, enabling teams to deliver with confidence and pace
- Proactively identify and remove blockers that impact delivery flow, team effectiveness, or engineering output
Team Leadership & Performance
- Lead, mentor, and develop software engineers, fostering high performance, continuous learning, and career growth
- Build a strong engineering culture centred on ownership, collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement
- Manage contractors, temporary developers, and external engineering partners, ensuring consistent standards and seamless collaboration
- Set clear expectations for performance, delivery, and quality, addressing challenges constructively and decisively where needed
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Technical Quality & Operational Excellence
- Provide technical oversight of engineering output to ensure consistency, maintainability, and alignment with agreed engineering standards
- Champion effective code review practices and engineering discipline, ensuring high-quality delivery across the team
- Own engineering quality outcomes, including defect reduction, rework prevention, and minimising delivery regressions
- Continuously improve engineering processes to maximise throughput, reduce inefficiencies, and avoid unnecessary bureaucracy
- Partner closely with the Staff Engineer to ensure technical design and architecture decisions support scalable, sustainable delivery
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps, and QA/support teams to balance delivery goals with technical and operational constraints
- Provide clear visibility of delivery progress, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs to senior stakeholders
- Use delivery, utilisation, and quality metrics to inform decision-making, improve forecasting, and drive operational performance
Strategic Contribution
- Contribute to the evolution of engineering practices, delivery frameworks, and team capability as the organisation scales
- Play a key role in shaping a high-performing engineering function capable of supporting ambitious product growth and long-term business success
At The National College, we’re passionate about helping organisations grow and thrive through knowledge and connection. You’ll be part of a business that values its people, supports continuous development, and celebrates success.
You'll also be able to benefit from:
- Life assurance
- Enhanced maternity, paternity, shared parental, and adoption pay
- 24/7 online GP access
- Mental health and wellbeing support
- One paid charity day per year
- 25 days’ holiday, increasing to 30 days with service
- Professional study support
- Plus more
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