Head of Engineering - IT

Head of Engineering - IT

Location: Dorking or Farnborough, Hybrid

Hours: Full time

Department: IT

Reports to: Digital Projects Lead

Direct Reports: 6

DERTOUR UK is looking for an experienced Head of Engineering to lead engineering delivery across our digital product ecosystem. This is a senior leadership role with accountability for building high-performing engineering teams, driving modern engineering practices, and ensuring we deliver scalable, secure and reliable digital products across our portfolio of travel brands.

As part of the DERTOUR Group, one of Europe’s leading travel groups, DERTOUR UK supports a range of well-known specialist travel brands including Kuoni, Carrier, CV Villas, Explore, Inghams, Inntravel, Journey Latin America, Jules Verne, Kirker, Santas Lapland and Solmar Villas. Our IT and digital teams play a key role in enabling these brands to deliver outstanding customer experiences.

The Role

In this newly created role of Head of Engineering, you will provide accountable leadership for engineering performance across our Product PODs, covering platform engineering, APIs and integrations, DevOps, data pipelines and quality engineering.

You will lead multi-disciplinary engineering teams across onshore and offshore resources, setting clear standards for delivery, quality, tooling, governance and continuous improvement. Working closely with Product, Delivery and Architecture leaders, you will translate business strategy into executable technical delivery and help shape the future of engineering across DERTOUR UK.

This is a great opportunity for someone who combines strong technical depth with the leadership capability to scale teams, improve delivery performance and embed modern, cloud-first engineering practices.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead engineering delivery and performance across Product PODs, ensuring strong sprint execution and clear delivery outcomes.
• Build, develop and support high-performing engineering teams across onshore and offshore resources.
• Own engineering standards, governance, tooling and best practice across software delivery.
• Drive modern engineering approaches including CI/CD, automation, cloud-native development and API-first architecture.
• Improve engineering KPIs including velocity, deployment frequency, cycle time, quality and reliability.
• Ensure digital products, platforms and components are scalable, secure, reusable and high-performing.
• Partner closely with Product, Delivery and Architecture teams to align technical delivery with business priorities.
• Lead automation and AI-enabled engineering capabilities to improve speed, quality and developer productivity.
• Optimise engineering capacity, resource allocation and vendor utilisation.
• Build strong relationships across the wider DERTOUR Group to share best practice and support common strategic goals.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for a senior engineering leader with extensive experience building, scaling and managing high-performing engineering teams in complex, customer-facing digital environments.

You’ll bring:

• Strong leadership experience across software engineering teams, ideally within travel, e-commerce, consumer digital or another high-volume sector.
• Deep knowledge of modern software engineering practices, including microservices, API-first design and cloud-native platforms such as Azure, AWS or GCP.
• Proven experience delivering at scale across multiple engineering teams within a product-led operating model.
• Experience managing distributed delivery teams, including onshore and offshore resources.
• Strong DevOps capability, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and automated testing frameworks.
• A solid understanding of data-driven and API-led ecosystems.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering, automation, advanced tooling or analytics platforms to improve productivity and delivery.
• Significant experience working with .net, Agile and Product POD-based structures.
• The ability to operate both strategically and operationally, translating business priorities into clear engineering outcomes.

About you

You will be a collaborative and pragmatic leader who can influence at senior levels while staying close to delivery. You’ll be comfortable setting direction, raising standards and creating the conditions for engineering teams to perform at their best.

You’ll bring a strong focus on accountability, continuous improvement, innovation and engineering excellence, with the resilience and commercial awareness needed to deliver in a fast-moving digital environment.

Why join us?

This is an opportunity to play a key role in shaping engineering capability across DERTOUR UK, supporting a diverse portfolio of trusted travel brands. You’ll have the chance to influence engineering strategy, modernise ways of working and help deliver digital products that support exceptional customer experiences.

In return, you’ll enjoy a competitive package designed to support your wellbeing, lifestyle, and future:

• Competitive salary that recognises your experience and impact
• Perkbox membership – access to discounts, rewards and everyday perks
• Company matched pension - to help you plan for the future
• Generous annual leave – 25 days plus bank holidays, rising to 30 days with service
• Enhanced sick pay – up to 6 weeks’ support when you need it most
• Your birthday off – because it’s worth celebrating
• Electric Vehicle scheme through Octopus (salary sacrifice) to support greener travel
• Free annual travel insurance for you and your partner/family
• Long service awards to recognise your commitment
• Free eye tests
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Discounted holidays and exciting prize draws