Head of Engineering

Job Description

Help build the future of fair hiring in the AI era.n

At Arctic Shores, we’re creating a world of work where potential matters more than experience.

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Our market-leading, task-based psychometric assessments help organisations like Amazon, Siemens and Jet2 make fair, evidence-based hiring decisions. We’ve doubled ARR year-on-year for the past three years and are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead the next chapter.

nThe opportunityn

This is a rare chance to lead engineering at a purpose-driven scale-up where technical excellence truly matters.

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You’ll lead a small, high-calibre team of Software Developers and DevSecOps engineers working on a microservice architecture running on Kubernetes in AWS. It's built following strict functional design principles, TDD and CI/CD pipelines to automatically deploy to production.

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You’ll combine people leadership with technical evolution of the platform through guiding team architecture discussions, balancing quality with pragmatism, and ensuring our platform remains secure, scalable, resilient and cost-efficient as we grow.

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If you’re excited by leading a team where you can genuinely shape the future of our platform and how it can evolve to support the business, this could be your role.

nWhy this role might be a great fit for youn

You might already be a Head of Engineering looking for more autonomy and purpose. Or you might be an experienced Engineering Manager or Tech Lead ready for your first Head of role.

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You’ll thrive here if you:

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• Have a strong JVM background (Scala, Kotlin or Java) particularly using functional programming principles

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• Possess a strong testing mindset with experience in TDD and CI/CD practices.

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• Are experienced with AWS and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform).

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• Have knowledge of event-driven architecture and API design.

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• Feel confident to jump into different aspects of our code base, orient yourself and remove blockers for the team

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• Are motivated to coach and develop engineers through regular 1:1s and collaboration

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• Think about platform reliability, security, and cost efficiency as much as feature delivery

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• Like solving complex problems collaboratively and pragmatically

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If most of that resonates (even if your path has been unconventional) we’d love to hear from you.

nOur StacknLanguages & Frameworksn

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• Scala, Kotlin, Typescript, Python

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• Http4s, Http4k, Circe, Cats, Cats-Effect, Doobie, React, Exposed

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nTestingn

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• Specs2, ScalaCheck

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nInfrastructure & DevOpsn

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• AWS (EKS, Lambda, RDS/Postgres, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, S3, Cognito, Route53, VPC, EC2)

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• Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Ansible, Puppet

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• GitLab CI

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nObservability & Datan

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• Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch

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• Snowflake

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You don’t need experience in every tool, but you should feel confident in modern cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code environments.

nOur Engineering Philosophyn

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• We follow functional programming principles

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• We run Kanban and focus on the smallest effort that delivers meaningful impact

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• We practice TDD and maintain comprehensive automated test suites

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• Everything is automated and version-controlled

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• We evolve our ways of working through team retrospectives

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• We favour simple, maintainable architectures over unnecessary complexity

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nWhat you’ll don

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• Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team, aligning capacity to the roadmap and closing capability gaps.

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• Shape technical direction championing best practice, guiding architecture and code quality, and aligning engineering with company strategy.

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• Own delivery and reliability ensuring secure, scalable releases while optimising AWS costs.

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• Partner cross-functionally with Product and customer-facing teams to deliver roadmap outcomes and ensure technical excellence.

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nWhat you’ll get at Arctic Shoresn

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• Competitive salary – £100k-£115k depending on experience.

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• Share Options scheme

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• 28 days holiday + public holidays (plus extra for length of service)

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• Private medical and mental health cover

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• 2 mental wellbeing days per year

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• Aviva pension (3% employer / 5% employee)

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• Hybrid working and core hours flexibility

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• Enhanced parental leave

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• Fertility support

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• Company sick pay

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• Own Days — one day every month dedicated to your development

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• Cycle2Work scheme

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• Length of service awards

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• Central Manchester office location

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• A supportive team and a meaningful mission

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nThe closing date for applications is Monday 4th May 2026nEqual Opportunitiesn

At Arctic Shores, giving people a fair chance is what we do — and that starts with hiring.

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We welcome people of any background, gender identification, race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, ability level, age, size, marital status, style, or music taste.

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If you need adjustments at any stage of the process, let us know — we’ll do everything we can to support you.

nCompliancen

ISO 27001

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Cyber Essentials compliant

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