Head of Engineering - Developer Experience & Platform (F/m/d)

Head of Engineering - Developer Experience & Platform
Awin is seeking an exceptional engineering leader to shape the future of how our engineers build, ship, and operate software at scale. As Head of Engineering - Developer Experience & Platform, you will own the end-to-end developer experience strategy, drive the adoption of AI-native engineering practices, modernise our cloud platform, and lead the teams and tooling that enable Awin's engineering organisation to work at its best.
This is a high-impact leadership role at the intersection of engineering excellence, platform strategy, and AI innovation. You will define and deliver the developer experience (DevEx) vision for Awin, ensuring our engineers have the tools, environments, processes, and culture to be highly productive and deeply satisfied in their work. You will own our platform strategy on AWS, lead FinOps practices, and spearhead the organisation-wide rollout of AI-augmented and agentic development workflows.
You will act as a trusted internal champion for engineers - gathering data-driven insight, translating it into organisation-wide improvements, and working hand-in-hand with engineering leadership, product, and stakeholders to make change happen and allow our Product teams to deliver value to our customers at scale.
Key Tasks & Responsibilities
Developer Experience Strategy & Tooling
- Own and evolve Awin's Developer Experience programme - defining the vision, strategy, and roadmap for DevEx improvement across the engineering organisation
- Identify friction points, productivity blockers, and systemic inefficiencies through data, qualitative research, and direct engagement with engineering teams, other Heads of Engineering or Engineering Managers
- Drive organisation-wide improvements to technology, tooling, and engineering processes, building consensus and alignment with key stakeholders across product, engineering, security, and operations.
- Establish and track DevEx metrics and KPIs (e.g. DORA metrics, developer satisfaction scores), using them to demonstrate impact and guide investment decisions.
- Own the developer tools portfolio and associated budgets - evaluating, procuring, and retiring tools to ensure engineers have best-in-class tooling without unnecessary cost or complexity.
- Lead strategic assessment and rollout of new developer tooling, including CI/CD platforms, IDE capabilities, code quality and security tools.
AI-Native Development & Agentic Workflows
- Lead Awin's AI engineering rollout - defining the strategy for AI-native software development, establishing standards, and scaling adoption across the engineering organisation.
- Evaluate and implement AI-augmented development tools including AI coding assistants, agentic development environments, automated code review, test generation, and intelligent CI/CD pipelines.
- Champion modern AI-native software development best practices and drive continuous evaluation of the rapidly evolving AI tooling landscape.
- Design and deliver enablement programmes - training, communities of practice, documentation, and hands-on workshops - to accelerate AI fluency and confidence across engineering teams.
- Measure and report on the impact of AI adoption on developer productivity, code quality, and time-to-market.
Cloud Platform Optimisation
- Lead the strategy and execution of cloud platform standardisation across Awin's AWS estate, establishing golden paths, reference architectures, and platform abstractions that improve developer experience and reduce cognitive load.
- Drive cloud migration efforts, infrastructure modernisation initiatives, partnering with Product teams to improve reliability, scalability, observability, and security posture (including platform-wide Incident Management, SRE
- Own AWS cost management and FinOps practices - establishing budgeting frameworks, implementing cost allocation and tagging strategies, identifying and acting on optimisation opportunities, and providing transparent reporting to leadership.
- Build out internal developer platform capabilities to abstract cloud complexity and accelerate developer self-service.
- Ensure cloud platform decisions are made with developer experience as a primary consideration alongside cost efficiency, security, and scalability.
Leadership & Organisational Impact
- Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team spanning developer experience, platform engineering, and tooling functions.
- Act as a collaborative, influential engineering leader, shaping Awin's technical culture, engineering standards, and ways of working.
- Contribute to the engineering leadership team, participating in strategic planning, headcount discussions, and broader organisational design.
Skills & Experience
- Significant experience in and passion for software engineering, with hands-on coding background in one or more major languages (e.g. Java, TypeScript).
- Strong understanding of AI-native software developme