Head of Engineering, Rotageek
Salary not provided
AWS
Azure
Senior and Expert level
London
1+ day a week in office
Data informed employee scheduling
Be an early applicant
Data informed employee scheduling
21-100 employees
RetailB2BHRInternal toolsProductivityMachine LearningSaaS
Be an early applicant
Salary not provided
AWS
Azure
Senior and Expert level
London
1+ day a week in office
21-100 employees
RetailB2BHRInternal toolsProductivityMachine LearningSaaS
Company mission
To help businesses perfectly predict and meet demand by using data-driven tech to effectively and fairly schedule staff.
Role
Who you are
- Proven experience owning a multi-squad engineering function's delivery and operational health end-to-end
- Experience leading through managers or squad leaders, including hiring, coaching, performance management and succession planning
- A track record of improving the numbers: delivery predictability, quality, cost, incident performance, support ageing or similar operational measures
- Strong delivery discipline. You set clear commitments, protect capacity for agreed priorities and close loops rather than allowing work to age unnoticed
- The confidence to create an honest reporting culture and communicate risks early, including upwards
- Experience shaping or operating domain-driven teams with clear ownership and healthy interfaces between squads
- Experience putting AI into the way an engineering function works, including practical tooling, adoption, validation and safe-use guardrails
- Product-led-growth experience, particularly around instrumentation, activation, adoption, expansion or self-serve capability, while maintaining a successful sales-led motion
- Enough technical depth to contribute confidently to architecture conversations about boundaries, integrations, build versus buy, technical debt, migrations, reliability and cost
- Experience in workforce management, scheduling, enterprise SaaS, retail, hospitality, healthcare, distribution, SaaS unit economics or cloud-cost management would be a bonus
What the job involves
- Lead Rotageek’s engineering function across product, data and platform, building accountable AI-enabled teams that deliver reliably and power the shift to product-led growth
- Reports to the CTO
- Rotageek builds workforce-management software that helps organisations schedule the right people, in the right place, at the right time
- Our product supports enterprise operators across retail, hospitality, distribution and healthcare, managing demand-driven scheduling, time and attendance, leave and labour-cost optimisation across thousands of locations
- We work on complex operational problems where forecasting informs planning, planning drives time tracking, and time tracking feeds payroll. The decisions we make have real consequences for customers, their people and their costs
- Rotageek is part of the ELMO group, with engineering capability across the UK and Australia
- We are looking for a Head of Engineering to own Rotageek engineering end-to-end
- You will lead through an established Squad Leadership layer across product-delivery squads, Intelligence and Insights, data-science optimisation, and platform, DevOps and support. You will turn direction into delivery: setting clear commitments, building the operating rhythm that closes them, and making sure the function reports honestly on its progress
- This is an execution-focused leadership role. We are looking for someone who sets hard dates and hits them, leads with meaningful numbers, holds their position with senior stakeholders, and creates real accountability through their leadership team
- That means building the instrumentation, activation and self-serve capability needed for the next stage of the product, while keeping the commercial organisation fully supported in the sales-led motion that funds the transition
- The engineering organisation is moving towards an AI-native, domain-driven squad model. Squads will own their domains; you will make sure the boundaries are clear, the standards are consistent and the outcomes are delivered
- Own the Rotageek engineering function, including delivery, operational health, quality, security, cost, capability and headcount
- Lead and develop the Squad Leadership layer, hiring well, managing performance directly and giving squad leaders the authority to make decisions while holding them accountable for outcomes
- Establish a delivery cadence that makes commitments, forecasts, risks, dependencies and closure visible across the function. When a date is at risk, surface it early with options
- Deliver the committed roadmap of customer-facing integrations, product work and platform programmes, including the migration from Azure to AWS
- Set and enforce the engineering standard across squads: testing, code review, security scanning, release readiness, progressive rollout and rollback, production ownership and on-call
- Build the operational measurement layer for engineering, covering delivery predictability, cycle time, deployment pace, change failure and recovery, incident and support ageing, escaped defects, quality-gate compliance and cloud cost per tenant
- Own engineering budget execution across headcount, contractors, vendors, tooling and cloud run-rate, with clear forecasts and managed variances
- Own the incident and support operating models, including severity classification, escalation, major-incident communication, root-cause reviews, L2/L3 support and action tracking through to closure
- Set the engineering agenda behind product-led growth: product instrumentation, event models, activation and adoption measurement, expansion signals and self-serve capability
- Shape domain-driven squads with clear ownership, contracts and interfaces, and resolve the systemic technical problems that repeatedly slow delivery or create customer impact
- Partner with the CTO, CPO, CRO and wider executive team, bringing evidence-based views on feasibility, capacity, risk, investment and customer value
- Own the function's security, compliance and risk posture across a multi-tenant estate with UK and Australian data-residency obligations
- You will work through small, domain-owning squads supported by an established Squad Leadership layer. Product, engineering, QA, data and commercial colleagues work together in a delivery-focused rhythm, with clear ownership and written visibility of decisions, risks and commitments
- You will work closely with our Australian engineering capability, using strong async habits and a follow-the-sun DevOps model to make the time-zone difference an advantage rather than a source of friction
- We are building an AI-native SDLC. Claude Code is used across design, build, review and ship, with human oversight of AI-generated code and clear data and IP boundaries. We expect leaders to drive responsible adoption, measure the impact and keep quality and security standards high
Application process
- We usually respond within three days
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Many businesses still adopt labour-intensive, time-consuming, manual processes, which do not provide staffing metrics. Employee scheduling is often a cumbersome process and manual errors are common. Rotageek's product helps firms predict customer demand, schedule staff and improve operational efficiency.
The company has a strong client list, including Pets at Home and O2 who, along with the rest of its clients, use their software across their UK stores to more effectively schedule staff, provide cover for shifts and to manage leave during busy periods. By allowing user to with the wider company, including HR, payroll and other business functions, Rotageek offers a comprehensive solution.
The global workforce management sector is growing, as more and more companies automate their operations. This should provide a strong tailwind for Rotageek which appears to be going strong in the sector. Its acquisition by ELMO Group in 2025 broadens Rotageek's customer reach, while enhancing it's parent company's rostering and scheduling solutions.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jun 2022
$4m
LATE VC
May 2020
$8m
LATE VC
Total funding: $22.9m
Company benefits
- Work from home, work from a coffee shop, work where suits you. We also provide global co-working membership if desired
- Unlimited holiday: 25 days holiday + 1 extra on your birthday (excl. bank holidays) — We believe plenty of holidays set us up for success so allow annual leave requests above this as part of our unlimited leave policy
- £250 WFH setup budget + all the hardware you need
- Enhanced parental leave
- Private medical insurance with Vitality and support for mental health
Company HQ
Holborn, London, UK
Leadership
Chris McCullough
(CRO & Co-Founder)Has a PhD in Genetics after completing a Medicine degree at Edinburgh
Nick Mann
(Head of IT Ops/Integrations & Co-Founder)An IT professional with over 25 years experience in both development, architecture and project management.
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