Backbase - Director - Engineering

The Job in Short:
The Engineering Director runs engineering for the region, leading a group of engineering managers and the teams that deliver and customise our product for customers. You raise the bar through technical credibility rather than headcount, and you partner closely with technical and architecture leaders to make sure how we build matches what we build.
You are a technologist first, accountable for engineering quality and how AI and automation reshape our delivery.
Meet the Job:

- Engineering Direction: Set the direction for how engineering is run in the region, with a focus on integrating AI and agentic workflows into how teams deliver, customise, and extend the product for customers.

- You translate global technical standards into regional execution; your managers carry it into the teams.

- Technical Partnership: Work closely with technical leadership, governance, and architecture peers to ensure engineering practices and solution decisions in the region align with the broader technical direction.

- Partner with technical leads and architects so the right decisions get made close to the work, within the established guardrails, and escalate cross-cutting trade-offs through the right channels.

- Engineering Excellence: Own how engineering operates across the region. You set the standards for quality, velocity, and ways of working that hold across every customer engagement; your managers operationalise them inside their teams. You work as an equal partner to delivery and technical leadership, jointly accountable for customer success.

- Lead by Example: Stay close enough to the stack to remain credible. You are the leader engineers bring their hardest problems to, and the one who unblocks the team by diving into complex customer issues, integration challenges, or proving out new solution patterns.

- Agentic Ways of Working: Champion the regional rollout of our agentic engineering operating model.

- This is a fundamental shift in how engineering gets done, and you are accountable for bringing it to the engineering function: enabling managers and engineers on new tooling and patterns, building the muscle to use them well, and feeding learnings back into how the approach evolves. The brief is stewardship of a continuously improving way of working, not a one-time rollout.

- Team Leverage: Develop the next layer of leadership across the region. Grow strong managers and senior engineers so the organisation compounds in capability.

How About You:
- Technical Mastery: A career rooted in deep technical execution. You remain a developer at heart and are credible in architecture and code-level discussions, even if your day-to-day work has shifted.

- Leadership Experience: 10+ years of engineering experience, with a meaningful track record of leading through other leaders (managers, tech leads, or staff engineers) rather than only individual contributors.

- Pragmatic Operator: You hold a high bar for engineering quality but no patience for process that doesn't earn its keep. You know which corners can be cut and which cannot, and you push your teams to ship.

- AI Fluency: Hands-on experience with agentic engineering workflows in real-world settings. You have a clear, opinionated view on what it takes to operationalise these ways of working at scale enabling teams, embedding new practices, sustaining adoption, and evolving the approach as the tooling and patterns mature.

- Operating Range: Comfortable moving between strategy, architecture, and code. You build leverage through the team without losing touch with the work.

- Education: CS degree or equivalent experience. Advanced degree is a plus but not required.