Director of Engineering — Salon Operations & Consumer (12-month contract)

The Opportunity

This is a 12-month fixed-term maternity cover for the Director of Engineering — Salon Operations & Consumer.

You'll lead two engineering organisations, partnering closely with Product, Design and fellow Engineering leaders to ensure our teams continue to deliver exceptional products for our customers. As a manager of managers, you'll provide stability, clear direction and strategic leadership while maintaining a healthy, high-performing engineering organisation.

Success in this role means delivering predictable outcomes, supporting exceptional leaders, and ensuring our teams continue to thrive throughout the transition.

What You’ll Do

Lead with the customer in mind

• Champion a customer-first engineering culture, balancing product delivery with technical excellence, reliability, and long-term platform health.

• Help teams stay focused on delivering meaningful customer outcomes while making thoughtful trade-offs when priorities compete.

Lead Engineering for Salon Operations & Consumer

• Provide strategic engineering leadership across the domain, building strong partnerships with Product, Design, Customer Success, and Support.

• Create clarity, alignment, and momentum, empowering teams to make great decisions and deliver with confidence.

Drive operational excellence

• Oversee our Level 3 support model, ensuring customer issues are resolved quickly while identifying opportunities to improve reliability, tooling, and engineering practices.

• Champion high standards for quality, security, performance, and operational health across your organisation.

Shape strategy and deliver impact

• Translate business goals into a clear engineering vision and roadmap.

• Drive initiatives that improve customer outcomes while balancing delivery, technical investment, and organisational priorities.

Grow exceptional leaders and teams

• Coach and support Heads of Engineering and Principal Engineers to build high-performing, engaged teams.

• Foster a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, feedback, and growth.

Build a healthy engineering organisation

• Ensure teams have the people, processes, and support they need to succeed.

• Use data and team feedback to continually improve performance, engagement, and the way we work.

Who You Are

• Proven experience as a Director of Engineering or similar leading multiple teams/groups in a product software environment (manager-of-managers).

• Strong track record in delivery leadership: prioritisation, risk management, dependency coordination, and stakeholder communication.

• Credible technical depth to challenge and support architectural choices (without needing to be a hands-on contributor).

• Experience partnering closely with Product to deliver outcomes for customers.

• Demonstrated people leadership: coaching managers incl. managers of managers, developing senior ICs, creating clarity and psychological safety.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making timely decisions with incomplete information.

Benefits

🧘Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.

💰As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.

🚵🏿 We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.

🦸‍♀️We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.

🍼We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.

🌳We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.

🏠Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Want to learn more about Phorest? Check out nothingventured.rocks for our blog and Insights on building an evergreen company from the team here at Phorest.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.