Head of Engineering

Department: Product & Technology

Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to our London office)

Reports to: CTO

Hours: 37.5  per week

Salary: Depending on experience

Role Overview: 

The Head of Engineering role will lead the EDUKATE platform engineering function and the Data & Insights team, owning technical strategy, delivery and people leadership across both areas. The role will be  responsible for setting functional strategy, managing managers and senior ICs, and ensuring scalable, gold-standard ways of working aligned with Cambridge Spark’s mission and values.

The Head of Engineering will lead the end-to-end design, development and operation of EDUKATE.AI, ensuring a robust, scalable and enterprise ready platform that delivers an exceptional experience for learners, clients and internal stakeholders.

The successful candidate will own the Data & Insights strategy, turning platform and business data into actionable intelligence for internal teams and customers.

They will act as a functional leader for engineering and data, setting technical direction, growing high-performing teams and contributing to company-wide strategy.

Key responsibilities:

• Contribute to the development of the product roadmap for EDUKATE.AI and own timely technical implementation according to agreed milestones.
• Develop, in collaboration with internal stakeholders, our Data & Insights roadmap and own implementation.
• Oversee architecture and implementation of platform components: content development environment, learner experience, trainer/mentor/coach/ops delivery tools, employer dashboard, and associated data pipelines and APIs.
• Ensure robust engineering practices across teams: CI/CD, testing strategy (unit, integration, end-to-end), monitoring/observability, security and reliability for a cloud-native platform.
• Drive adoption of AI-powered development workflows (including code generation, automated testing and agents) to achieve step-change improvements in team productivity while maintaining high quality and security standards. Establish baselines and measure productivity gains from AI tooling.

• Lead, coach and develop Engineering and Data & Insights managers and ICs, creating a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement in line with Cambridge Spark values (Entrepreneurial Spirit, Team Spirit, Customer Focus, Gold Standard).
• Apply the Cambridge Spark development framework to support progression, performance management and calibration across levels
• Build and refine team structure, capacity planning and hiring strategy across both functions, ensuring the right skills mix to deliver the roadmap and future growth.

• Partner closely with Product, Delivery, Curriculum and Sales teams to translate business objectives and learner needs into clear technical plans and measurable outcomes.
• Represent Engineering and Data & Insights in planning, budgeting and prioritisation initiatives, providing clear trade-offs, timelines and risk assessments to senior leadership
• Partner with commercial teams to understand internal and external client requirements for platform capabilities, ensuring EDUKATE.AI is positioned for delivering maximum value

• Own platform quality end-to-end: ensuring non-functional requirements (performance, uptime, security, scalability) are defined and met, bug backlogs are triaged and actively managed, regression issues are caught before release, and production incidents are resolved quickly with proper root cause analysis.
• Own data strategy for the platform and internal analytics, ensuring appropriate access for internal stakeholders.
• Establish and track engineering and data KPIs (e.g. availability, deployment frequency, incident metrics, data quality, open bug count and age, time-to-fix for critical issues, regression rate per release), using them to drive continuous improvement.

• Shape and evolve ways of working, standards and frameworks used across engineering and data, ensuring consistency, scalability and alignment with the wider organisation
• Act as organisational subject-matter authority on engineering and data topics, coaching other leaders and representing these functions internally and, where appropriate, externally.

Candidate Specification: 

Essential

• Significant track record leading engineering teams delivering complex platforms, including responsibility for architecture, delivery and operations in a cloud environment.
• ​​​​​​​Experience managing managers and senior ICs, with proven ability to grow and develop talent through structured frameworks and feedback.
• Exposure to data and analytics functions (e.g. BI, data engineering, analytics or data science), with the ability to set direction and integrate data into products and decision-making.
• Demonstrated success collaborating with product and business stakeholders to prioritise work and ship impactful features in an agile, fast-paced environment.
• Experience establishing and enforcing quality standards in a product environment, including managing bug backlogs, defining release readiness criteria, and balancing speed with stability.
• Track record of managing performance while maintaining team morale and culture​​​​​​​

• Strong engineering background across backend APIs, data pipelines and modern web stacks, with familiarity with technologies similar to those used for EDUKATE.AI (e.g. Python web frameworks, modern JavaScript frameworks, SQL databases, cloud services).
• Understanding of platform observability, performance optimisation, security and scalability patterns for multi-tenant SaaS or similar architectures.
• Understanding of best practices of AI for software engineering, with prior experience leveraging AI to increase an engineering team’s productivity
• Comfortable with modern engineering workflows and tooling: Git-based workflows, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and automated testing at multiple levels.
• Hands-on experience deploying AI coding assistants and agentic workflows at scale, with demonstrated productivity improvements. Ability to evaluate emerging AI engineering tools and integrate them into team workflows rapidly.

• Strategic and system thinker who can connect technical decisions to learner outcomes, client value and company strategy.
• Strong communicator able to engage both technical and non-technical audiences, simplifying complexity and building trust across the organisation.
• Values-driven leader who embodies Cambridge Spark’s values and contributes to an inclusive, learning-oriented culture.

Company Benefits: 

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave 
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m. 

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.  Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.