Vice President of Technology

Job description

MOO brings brands to life in a sustainable way, with a range of remarkable print and merchandise products. We combine design, technology, manufacturing and service, so that people can connect in memorable ways. Not online but out there, in real life. We started in 2004. Since then we’ve built an award-winning and much-loved brand, with customer satisfaction and Trustpilot ratings that make most businesses want to give up and hire an army of review bots. We’ve got half a million customers, mostly small and medium businesses in North America, the UK, and Europe – businesses that, like us, get all excited about putting something real and beautiful into people’s hands. Does that make us nerds? Probably, and we’re ok with that. We’ve been given the highest business award in Britain, ‘The Queen’s Award for Enterprise’. Backed by venture capital, we’re part of Tech Nation’s ‘Future Fifty’, recently passing $1bn in lifetime revenue, and featuring in the Guardian’s top 10 UK start-ups list. Ok, we’ll stop bragging now. Today, we’re more than 400 people with our global HQ in London, UK, while we also have premises in Dagenham. In the US, you’ll find us in Boston, MA, as well as East Providence, RI and Denver, CO and with our most recent office expansion in Cape Town South Africa. At MOO, technology runs the whole length of the business. From the moment a customer lands on the site and starts designing, through checkout and order orchestration, all the way to the machines on our factory floor that print, cut, and finish the product. We're a vertically integrated company: we design it, we make it, and we sell it. Few technology leaders get to work across a scope this broad. We're looking for a VP of Technology to lead our technology organisation through a period of significant change and investment. We're modernising the platform that powers our ecommerce experience, connecting it more tightly to the post-purchase and manufacturing systems behind it, and raising the bar on how our teams build. You'll be the most senior technology leader in the business, sitting alongside our commercial, product, and operations leaders, representing technology to our executive team, and our board and accountable for the health, performance, and output of the whole organisation. The direction is set and the team is moving. We are not looking for someone to tear it up and start again, and we are not looking for a caretaker either. We want someone who raises the ambition, pace, and standards of a team that has momentum, and who changes things by building trust rather than by decree. The mission matters and the ambition is high, and there's real work to do: sharpening how we deliver, growing and keeping brilliant people, and making deliberate, well-sequenced technology bets that move the business forward. ### What you'll do **Represent technology at the top of the business.** Own the technology strategy, the budget, and the narrative. Face off with the executive team and the board and make the case for where technology investment goes and what it returns. **Lead the functions.** Own functional leadership across all of technology, spanning our ecommerce teams (storefront through checkout), our post-purchase and fulfilment teams, and the systems that run our manufacturing operations, with our platform and IT functions joining as part of an org design you will lead. Set the standards, the technical direction, and the way the team operates. **Set the pace.** Hold the organisation accountable for outcomes, through your leaders rather than around them. Raise the ambition and the standard, and give your engineering leaders the support and air cover to deliver at pace. **Build and grow a high-performing team.** Hire well, develop your leaders and engineers, and create the conditions where great people do their best work and choose to stay. Own the engineering culture, the performance bar, and how the organisation is structured. **Partner across the business.** Work closely with Product, Commercial, and Operations leadership to turn strategy into a credible, sequenced delivery plan. Translate engineering investment into business outcomes, and make the trade-offs visible. **Drive the platform forward.** Steer the modernisation of our ecommerce platform and its connection to the systems behind it, keeping delivery flowing while the foundations change underneath. Make pragmatic build-versus-buy calls and sequence the work so the business sees value quickly rather than only at the end. **Raise the engineering bar.** Own quality, reliability, and delivery performance across the organisation. Bring rigour to how we measure and improve throughput, stability, and the day-to-day developer experience. **Lead responsible AI adoption.** Champion the effective and responsible adoption of AI tooling and modern software development practices across the team. Set the guardrails, prove the value, and help our engineers do better work, faster. ### What you'll bring - A strong track record of senior leadership. You've led engineering organisations, not just teams: you've managed managers, grown other engineering leaders beneath you, and owned org design at scale. - A track record of taking an organisation through a step-change in pace and performance, or through a major transformation, and delivering the result. You've moved an organisation forward, not only held one together. - You operate as a true executive: you help shape company strategy and set technical direction, rather than waiting for it to be handed down. - Experience operating with boards and investors in a growth or investor-backed business, and comfortable being the technology voice in that room. - Breadth across the stack: experience with customer-facing ecommerce or consumer web, and with the operational, back-office, or supply-chain systems behind it. Exposure to manufacturing, logistics, or physical-product operations is a strong plus. - Experience modernising a significant platform, ideally moving from a monolith toward a modern, service-based or headless architecture, without stalling delivery along the way. - A genuine talent for building and retaining high-performing teams, with a high hiring bar and a real investment in growing people. - Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development and modern SDLC practices, and a clear point of view on adopting them responsibly and effectively. - Commercial instinct: you connect engineering decisions to revenue, cost, and customer outcomes, and you can hold your own with commercial and finance leaders. - Clear, credible communication with engineers and executives alike, and the judgement to know which conversation you're in. ### In your first year, success looks like - A healthy, well-structured organisation that delivers predictably, where great people are set up to do their best work and want to stay. - Platform modernisation progressing against a plan the whole business understands and believes in. - A technology cost line the CFO understands and trusts, with a clear line from investment to business outcome. - AI-assisted ways of working adopted deliberately and measurably across the team. - Product, commercial, and operations partners who trust engineering to deliver, with the trade-offs behind the roadmap made clear.