The Role
Lead multiple engineering teams, providing strategic and technical leadership, ensuring high-quality software delivery, and fostering a culture of accountability and improvement. Monitor team health and technical execution, advocating for modern practices like CI/CD and effective stakeholder collaboration.
Summary Generated by Built In
Location: Onsite/hybrid
Team Model: Leader of multiple cross-functional software development teams (pods)
Reports to: VP of Engineering
Direct Reports: Engineering Managers; may include Senior Engineers depending on organisational structure
The Role:
Provide strategic, technical, and organisational leadership across multiple engineering teams to deliver high quality software predictably and sustainably. Empower and develop Engineering Managers and technical leaders, shape long-term engineering direction, and ensure strong alignment between delivery, stakeholder priorities, and organisational goals. Champion modern engineering practices such as continuous delivery, automation, observability, and improved development flow driving sustainable, scalable excellence across the broader engineering organisation.
Key Responsibilities
1) Organisational Leadership & Team Health
Datalex is a market leader in airline e-commerce solutions. Datalex's Stellex product suite, launched in 2024, gives airlines the tools they need to drive revenue and profit as digital retailers. Datalex has a strong track record working with some of the most innovative airline brands worldwide, such as Air China, Air Macau, Air Transat, Aer Lingus, easyJet, and Edelweiss. The Group is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and maintains offices across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Learn more at www.datalex.com
Team Model: Leader of multiple cross-functional software development teams (pods)
Reports to: VP of Engineering
Direct Reports: Engineering Managers; may include Senior Engineers depending on organisational structure
The Role:
Provide strategic, technical, and organisational leadership across multiple engineering teams to deliver high quality software predictably and sustainably. Empower and develop Engineering Managers and technical leaders, shape long-term engineering direction, and ensure strong alignment between delivery, stakeholder priorities, and organisational goals. Champion modern engineering practices such as continuous delivery, automation, observability, and improved development flow driving sustainable, scalable excellence across the broader engineering organisation.
Key Responsibilities
1) Organisational Leadership & Team Health
- Set clear expectations, standards, and operating models for Engineering Managers and their teams.
- Act as a visible role model for leadership excellence, demonstrating the behaviours, standards, and engineering discipline expected across all teams.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous improvement across all pods.
- Monitor team health, engineering capacity, delivery flow, and systemic impediments; intervene early and remove structural blockers.
- Ensure consistent, effective adoption of engineering rituals and best practices across teams.
- Lead, coach, and develop Engineering Managers; provide regular feedback, growth plans, and leadership development.
- Own performance management for EMs, including objective setting, calibration, and promotion recommendations.
- Support Engineering Managers with challenging personnel situations, performance improvement plans, and succession planning.
- Play an active role in hiring EMs, Senior Engineers, and other key technical roles; champion diversity and inclusion.
- Provide strategic technical leadership in partnership with Architects, Senior Engineers, and other technical stakeholders.
- Ensure Engineering Managers are effectively balancing short-term delivery with long-term maintainability, technical debt management, and platform resilience.
- Guide teams in adopting and maturing modern software development practices (CD, test automation, observability, secure-by-design, etc.).
- Monitor technical health, platform constraints, scalability trends, and cost efficiency across domains; intervene where needed.
- Own delivery outcomes across multiple teams, ensuring alignment with roadmap, OKRs, and organisational commitments.
- Partner with stakeholders to provide clear, accurate, programme-level delivery insights, risk assessments, and milestone reporting.
- Ensure that cross‑team dependencies, systemic risks, scope challenges, unforeseen complexity, and escalations are proactively identified and managed across the portfolio.
- Champion the improvement of engineering flow metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR) across teams.
- Drive consistent adoption of CI/CD, automation, and disciplined release governance to reduce toil and improve reliability.
- Maintain strong, transparent relationships with stakeholders across product, design, PMO, data, architecture, and other engineering domains.
- Align teams and EMs around shared priorities, clear trade-offs, and business outcomes.
- Represent engineering in cross-department initiatives, strategic planning, and executive-level discussions.
- Ensure accurate, timely communication of plans, progress, risks, and decisions - creating a predictable, “no surprises” environment.
- Significant experience leading multiple engineering teams and managing Engineering Managers (typically 5+ years in a manager-of-managers role).
- Strong engineering background with the ability to provide technical leadership without acting as the primary coder.
- Demonstrated success scaling engineering organisations, improving flow, and maturing engineering practices.
- Proven ability to navigate complex delivery environments, manage cross-team dependencies, and influence senior stakeholders.
- Excellence in leadership development, coaching, hiring, and building diverse, high-performing teams.
Datalex is a market leader in airline e-commerce solutions. Datalex's Stellex product suite, launched in 2024, gives airlines the tools they need to drive revenue and profit as digital retailers. Datalex has a strong track record working with some of the most innovative airline brands worldwide, such as Air China, Air Macau, Air Transat, Aer Lingus, easyJet, and Edelweiss. The Group is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and maintains offices across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Learn more at www.datalex.com
Top Skills
Automation
Continuous Delivery
Observability
Software Development Methodologies
Am I A Good Fit?
Get Personalized Job Insights.
Our AI-powered fit analysis compares your resume with a job listing so you know if your skills & experience align.
Success! Refresh the page to see how your skills align with this role.
The Company
What We Do
Datalex is a market leader in digital commerce for travel retail. Datalex provides airlines with unique products to drive revenue and profit as digital retailers. Today the Datalex Digital Commerce Platform enables a travel marketplace of over one billion shoppers covering every corner of the globe, driven by some of the world’s most innovative airline retail brands. Datalex’s customers include JetBlue Airways, Air China, Tianjin Airlines, West Air, Guangxi Beibu Gulf Airlines, Urumqi Air, Air Changan, SAS, KLM, Turkish Airlines, Copa Airlines, Aer Lingus, Edelweiss, Air Transat and Trailfinders. The Group is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and maintains offices across Europe, the USA and China. Datalex plc is a publicly listed company on Euronext Growth. Learn more at www.datalex.com or follow on Twitter @Datalex.
