Head of Engineering - Ad Management / Retail (all genders)

Job description

## About Us Factor Eleven is a leading drive-to-store revenue platform for brick-and-mortar retailers and CPG brands. Our platform automates the entire lifecycle of digital promotion communication - from media planning and ad creation through to campaign delivery, billing, and reporting. Operating as a high-touch enterprise managed service, humans orchestrate our campaign strategy while our platform automates execution. We’re hiring a **Head of Engineering for our AdManagement / Retail unit**. In this role, you will own the technical engine behind the primary interface of F11’s platform. Your mission is to lead, scale, and evolve an engineering organisation tasked with a massive, high-stakes objective: rebuilding these modules into a modern, **AI-native architecture**. You will act as the technical co-pilot to the Head of Product and collaborate closely with leadership peers across our other tribes and key commercial stakeholders. This is a role designed for a leader who thrives on breadth, loves complex orchestration, and wants to leave a definitive mark on a core enterprise platform. ## What You Will Do - **Lead & Scale Leaders:** Manage, coach, and develop a team of Engineering Managers. You will foster a culture of high performance, deep psychological safety, and continuous feedback. - **Drive Modernisation:** Spearhead the greenfield rebuild and platform modernisation of our four core modules into a distributed, cloud-native system. - **Architectural Guardrails:** Provide strong architectural oversight, ensuring key decisions align with our tech stack while actively embedding AI capabilities into both engineering workflows and product features. - **Cross-Functional Alignment:** Build rapid trust across technical and non-technical boundaries, translating complex engineering roadmaps into clear strategic value for commercial leaders. - **Operational Excellence:** Balance high-level strategic vision with relentless operational execution, ensuring high-quality, predictable delivery in a fast-paced environment. ## What We Are Looking For - 5+ years of leadership experience, with a proven track record of managing and developing Engineering Managers, not just individual contributors. - **Several years of experience in AdTech** product companies - 10+ years of total experience in software engineering, including solid knowledge of distributed systems and modern cloud architecture (**AWS**). - Hands-on experience or deep technical familiarity with **Node.js, TypeScript, React, and GraphQL**. - Exceptional interpersonal skills with a demonstrated ability to build trust quickly with cross-functional peers and commercial leaders. What Makes You Exceptional - **High Ambiguity Tolerance:** You are comfortable making sound technical and people decisions in environments without clear precedent or pre-defined processes. - **Domain Breadth:** You are energised by owning multiple adjacent domains simultaneously, preferring systemic breadth over a narrow, single-domain focus. - **AI-Native Mindset:** You don't just view AI as a buzzword; you actively look for ways to integrate it into your team's development workflows and the product's feature set. - **Strategic Product Builder:** You are an engineering leader who knows exactly when to build fresh and when to optimise, aligning technical execution with market opportunities. You have a sharp instinct for balancing technical debt against fast-paced business delivery.