Twinkl Educational Publishing
Head of Engineering
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Head of Engineering
Location: Remote with Sheffield HQ visits a minimum of 12 times a year
Annual Salary: £125,000 - £145,000 dependant on experience
At Twinkl, we're not just building software - we're transforming how millions of educators and learners interact with educational content and resources worldwide. By creating adaptable, comprehensive learning tools, we're breaking down educational barriers and building a global learning community. As we scale our platform to serve parents, teachers, and students across the globe, we're seeking a visionary Head of Engineering to drive our technical evolution, lead high-performing teams, and ensure strategic delivery.
We're in the midst of an exciting transformation, completely rebuilding our experience from the ground up. You'll lead multiple autonomous, product-centric engineering teams within the Acquisition and Retention pillar, empowered to make the right technical decisions and own their solutions. This role is a blend of technical stewardship, people leadership, and delivery ownership, holding you accountable for the coherence, health, and outcomes of engineering across your whole pillar.
What will you be doing?
- Set the Technical Direction: Own a coherent, pragmatic, and scalable technical strategy across your pillar. Work with Staff and Principal Engineers to evaluate decisions across teams, uphold engineering standards for architecture, testing, security, and maintainability, and tackle duplication, architectural drift, and fragile ownership before they slow teams down. Balance short-term delivery with the long-term health of your systems.
- Drive Operational Excellence: Be accountable for the operational health of the systems your teams own, from monitoring, alerting, and incident processes to resilience, security, scalability, and cost. Make sure incidents lead to genuine learning and clear ownership of actions, and keep technical debt visible, assessed, prioritised, and clearly communicated.
- Own Delivery Across Teams: Be accountable for engineering delivery against the agreed roadmap, technical priorities, and operational commitments. Spot risks early and unblock, re-sequence, de-scope, or escalate where needed. Keep the balance right across roadmap delivery, operational work, discovery, and team improvement, while making sure day-to-day ownership stays with your Engineering Managers and teams rather than defaulting to you.
- Lead and Grow Your Leaders: Own the health, capability, and effectiveness of the teams in your pillar. Line manage and coach Engineering Managers on delivery, people management, technical judgement, stakeholder management, and hiring. Own capability gaps, succession risk, and team structure, support calibration of performance and promotion decisions, and build inclusivity, diversity, and psychological safety into how your teams work.
- Communicate and Influence: Explain the health, risks, progress, and trade-offs of your pillar clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Partner early with Product, Design, and Education to shape strategy, roadmap, and sequencing, create alignment where teams have dependencies or competing priorities, and escalate risks with clear context, options, and recommendations.
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What do we need from you?
- Previous experience in a Head of Engineering role, built on a hands-on background that started with your career as a software engineer.
- Strong technical expertise and judgement beyond Engineering Manager level, with the ability to evaluate technical decisions across multiple teams within a pillar.
- Proven experience leading engineering teams, and ideally other leaders, while balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term technical health.
- A track record of owning delivery across multiple teams against a roadmap, making pragmatic trade-offs across speed, quality, cost, reliability, and maintainability.
- Demonstrated experience developing and coaching Engineering Managers, including performance management, promotion readiness, hiring, and team structure.
- A strong grasp of operational excellence, including monitoring, incident management, testing strategy, and the commercial impact of technical debt and infrastructure cost.
- Experience leading engineering teams working with AWS based systems and infrastructure.
- A strong understanding of modern engineering practices, and a track record of embedding them across teams.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to advocate for others' perspectives and tailor complex technical detail to a wide range of stakeholders.
- A commitment to building an inclusive and diverse team culture that encourages self-reflection and fosters a psychologically safe environment for giving and receiving feedback.
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What's in it for you?
- A friendly, welcoming and supportive culture. We believe work should be fun and always put people before process.
- Flexible working with fully remote and hybrid working options.
- 33 days annual leave per year, pro rata. You decide which public holidays to recognise.
- An additional day of annual leave, a Me Day, to take time for yourself.
- Charity day to volunteer and support a registered charity of your choice.
- Westfield Health (including Health Club discount and Westfield Rewards discount and cashback).
- Learning and Development opportunities, with opportunities for internal mobility across various departments / areas of the business.
- 4 x annual salary death in service life assurance.
- Quarterly awards designed to reward and recognise our wonderful Twinkl employees.
- Free Twinkl Subscription.
At Twinkl, we encourage diversity, and our doors are open to everyone. We're committed to creating an inclusive workplace for all. If you need any adjustments during the application process to showcase your abilities, please let us know. We're here to support you on your journey.
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