Head of Engineering

Key Responsibilities

• Engineering Leadership
• Lead, coach, and develop oneD's frontend, backend, infrastructure, and security teams.
• Establish clear responsibilities, performance expectations, and development plans for engineering employees.
• Build a culture of accountability, ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Determine the appropriate balance between internal engineering capabilities and outsourced development.
• Support engineering recruitment, onboarding, performance evaluation, and succession planning.
• Provide clear updates to the Head of Product & Technology regarding progress, risks, resources, and required decisions.
• Technical Delivery
• Translate the product roadmap into technical plans, resource requirements, delivery milestones, and release schedules.
• Ensure engineering commitments are realistic and delivered within the agreed scope, timeline, and quality standards.
• Coordinate development across frontend, backend, infrastructure, security, and third-party integrations.
• Identify technical dependencies and delivery risks before they affect major milestones.
• Improve engineering productivity without compromising product quality or platform stability.
• Establish clear technical acceptance criteria and definitions of done.
• Multi-Platform Development
• Oversee engineering delivery across iOS, Android, web, tablet, Apple TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, and LG Smart TV.
• Ensure consistent functionality and user experience across devices and operating systems.
• Improve maintainability and component reuse where technically appropriate.
• Manage operating-system updates, device compatibility, application-store requirements, and end-of-support decisions.
• Ensure each platform has clear ownership and sufficient technical documentation.
• Platform Reliability and Performance
• Own the technical reliability, performance, scalability, and availability of the oneD platform.
• Reduce crashes, freezing, buffering, playback failures, login problems, payment failures, and other customer-impacting defects.
• Establish service-level objectives for uptime, crash-free sessions, playback performance, API response time, and incident recovery.
• Implement effective application and infrastructure monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability.
• Lead technical incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Ensure corrective and preventive actions are completed after significant incidents.
• Prepare the platform for traffic peaks associated with major content releases and marketing campaigns.
• Software Architecture and Engineering Standards
• Define and maintain a scalable, secure, and maintainable technical architecture.
• Establish standards for coding, code reviews, source control, testing, documentation, deployment, and release management.
• Review major technical designs and ensure architectural decisions are documented.
• Identify, prioritise, and reduce technical debt.
• Ensure systems can support oneD's transition from AVOD to a hybrid AVOD and SVOD business model.
• Evaluate new technologies based on customer value, implementation risk, scalability, and total cost of ownership.
• Video Streaming Technology
• Work with the OTT Streaming Specialist to improve video playback quality and streaming reliability.
• Oversee technical integrations involving Brightcove, CDN services, content encoding, DRM, player technology, and playback analytics.
• Monitor playback start time, buffering, playback failures, video quality, and device-specific issues.
• Ensure streaming architecture can scale for simultaneous viewing and high-demand content.
• Coordinate with content and operations teams to ensure reliable content preparation, publishing, and availability.
• Quality Assurance and Release Management
• Work closely with the Head of QA to establish effective testing and release standards.
• Increase automated testing coverage across frontend, backend, APIs, and critical customer journeys.
• Ensure releases undergo appropriate functional, regression, performance, security, and compatibility testing.
• Establish release-readiness criteria, deployment controls, rollback procedures, and post-release monitoring.
• Reduce escaped defects and prevent recurring production issues.
• Ensure engineers share accountability for quality instead of treating quality as solely the responsibility of QA.
• Infrastructure, DevOps and Security
• Oversee the reliability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency of AWS and related infrastructure.
• Strengthen CI/CD, deployment automation, environment management, backups, and disaster-recovery capabilities.
• Ensure appropriate cybersecurity, access control, vulnerability management, and data-protection practices.
• Establish incident-response procedures for security and infrastructure events.
• Conduct regular capacity, resilience, and disaster-recovery reviews.
• Balance infrastructure performance requirements with responsible cloud-cost management.
• Data and Analytics Implementation
• Partner with the Head of Data to ensure accurate analytics implementation across every platform.
• Ensure product events and technical telemetry are correctly implemented, tested, and documented.
• Support reliable measurement of user journeys, playback, advertising, subscription, and platform performance.
• Resolve technical causes of missing, duplicated, delayed, or inconsistent data.
• Ensure monitoring tools such as Firebase and Datadog provide actionable engineering information.
• Vendor and Partner Management
• Manage technical delivery from outsourced developers and technology vendors.
• Establish clear scopes, technical standards, deliverables, service levels, and acceptance criteria.
• Evaluate vendors based on engineering quality, delivery reliability, responsiveness, cost, and knowledge transfer.
• Ensure oneD retains ownership and understanding of its source code, architecture, infrastructure, documentation, and technical decisions.
• Reduce dependency on individual vendors or undocumented external knowledge.
• Manage relationships with key technology partners, including AWS, Brightcove, application platforms, and other service providers.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• At least 10 years of software-engineering experience.
• At least 4-5 years of experience leading engineering teams.
• Proven experience delivering and operating large-scale consumer-facing digital products.
• Strong understanding of mobile, web, Smart TV, backend, API, cloud, and distributed-system architecture.
• Experience managing multidisciplinary engineering teams and outsourced development partners.
• Strong knowledge of DevOps, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, security, and incident management.
• Ability to balance delivery speed, product quality, technical debt, resources, and business priorities.
• Strong leadership, communication, planning, problem-solving, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to explain technical risks and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.