Head of Engineering

Spendesk is the AI-powered spend management and procurement platform trusted by thousands of finance teams across Europe. As our Head of Engineering, you'll lead a complete engineering group — several Engineering Managers, Senior EMs, and Staff Engineers — reporting directly to our CTO. You'll set the technical and organisational direction for your area, build the leadership team that runs it, and be accountable for the economics, reliability, and pace of everything it ships.

You will work with 2 to 4 Engineering Managers, reporting directly to you. You will collaborate with the Head of Product and the Head of Design, and other Head of Engineering responsible for other groups.

Your will be responsible for a multi-disciplinary engineering team of 20-30 people, with different seniority and skillset, spread across Europe.

Technical & organisational strategy

• Define the multi-quarter technical and organisational strategy for your group, aligned with Spendesk's company strategy.

• Drive architectural decisions and simplification across your domain — clear domain boundaries, “platformisation”, debt reduction.

• Make build vs. buy vs. partner calls, and own your group's AI/tooling strategy: what to standardise, what to pilot, and how you measure impact.

• Own your area's economics — cost-to-serve, infra efficiency, hiring ROI — with a clear quarterly view, and present the commercial rationale behind your investment decisions.

Delivery & operations

• Be accountable for delivery and outcomes across your full portfolio of squads, balancing competing priorities without losing sight of quality.

• Establish group-level KPIs, SLOs, and operating rhythms so your teams run well without you in every room.

• Champion end-to-end observability, sensible on-call, and postmortems that actually change things — reducing incident frequency and MTTR over time.

• Sequence hiring and headcount to maximise impact, and defend that plan to stakeholders with data.

Building your leadership team

• Hire, develop, and retain a strong, balanced leadership team of EMs, Senior EMs, and Staff Engineers.

• Coach your managers through their hardest calls: performance conversations, hiring decisions, prioritisation trade-offs.

• Lead performance calibration for your group and make the final call on promotions and compensation.

• Build succession plans for your key leadership roles, so no single departure puts your group at risk.

• Actively invest in retaining your best people, and keep a genuine pulse on team sentiment.

Influence beyond your team

• Represent Engineering in company-wide forums, partnering closely with Product, Design, Data, and customer-facing teams.

• Communicate your strategy and trade-offs clearly to both engineers and executives — you're as comfortable defending a roadmap to the leadership team as you are challenging an incident response plan.

• Champion diversity and inclusion in how you hire, develop, and run your organisation.

• 8+ years in software engineering with increasing scope, including 3+ years managing managers (Team Leads/EMs).

• A track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder programmes in product-led SaaS on time, on budget, with measurable results. Fintech, payments, or compliance experience is a strong plus.

• Hands-on experience operating distributed systems at scale in production, and enough technical depth to earn credibility with ICs and Team Leads, not just manage around them.

• Comfort with our stack (TypeScript, Node, React, AWS…). You don't need to write code daily, but you need to read it and question it.

• Real business acumen: you can talk unit economics, ROI, and trade-offs as fluently as you talk architecture.

• A genuine track record of growing managers into better managers, not just engineers into better engineers.

You'll join at a moment where the group you lead has room to simplify, room to invest in AI-augmented engineering, and a leadership team worth building further. You'll have a documented path behind you and ahead of you: Spendesk's Engineering Leadership Growth Journey maps the road from Engineering Manager through Head of Engineering to CTO, so you'll know exactly what's expected of you, and what growing further looks like once you're here.

You'll be based in one of our offices (Paris, London or Barcelona), with a flexible on-site rhythm agreed with your team.

As we are an international team, please submit your application and CV in English.

About Spendesk
Spendesk is the AI-powered spend management and procurement platform that transforms company spending. By simplifying procurement, payment cards, expense management, invoice processing, and accounting automation, Spendesk sets the new standard for spending at work. Its single, intelligent solution makes efficient spending easy for employees and gives finance leaders the full visibility and control they need across all company spend, even in multi-entity structures. Trusted by thousands of companies, Spendesk supports over 200,000 users across brands such as Payfit, Accor, Welcome to the Jungle, Swile, Big Mamma, Malt and Yousign. With offices in the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Germany, Spendesk also puts community at the heart of its mission.

For more information: www.spendesk.com/press

About our people & culture
We believe that people do their best work when they’re given the freedom to thrive and grow. That’s why liberation is at the core of everything we do. We empower Spendeskers to take ownership of their work, to navigate ambiguity, and seize every opportunity. Spendeskers come from all over the world (35+ countries and counting!) but we have plenty in common: we're bold, ever-curious, committed to kindness, and tackle every challenge with a positive mindset.

About our benefits
Our culture is built on trust, empowerment, and growth — with benefits to match!

• Flexible on-site and remote policy

• Latest Apple equipment — the tools you need to excel

• Access to Moka.care — for emotional and mental health wellbeing

• Great office snacks — to fuel your day

• A positive team to work with daily!

We also offer location-specific benefits tailored to each market, including health insurance, wellness allowances, commuter support, meal vouchers, and gym memberships — ensuring you're well supported wherever you're based.

Diversity & Inclusion

At Spendesk, we're committed to fostering an environment where all differences are encouraged, supported and celebrated. We're building our culture for everyone, with everyone. Our goal is to attract and build a diverse, equal and inclusive team, where everyone feels welcome and we truly embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.