WHAT DOES A HEAD OF ENGINEERING DO?
Reviewed by Lam Nguyen under Editorial Standards
Updated: Jun 02, 2025 - The Head of Engineering collaborates closely with key stakeholders in Product, Design, and Sales, delivering results and navigating roadblocks in a dynamic, high-growth environment. Establishes and drives a long-term vision and innovation in emerging spaces, holding managers accountable for critical results and prioritizations. Leads cross-functional teams, manage development budgets, and engages third-party partners to maintain high efficiency and achieve strategic objectives.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Head of Engineering
1. Head of Engineering Duties
- People Management: Manage the Engineering Department activities, people management, workload, and resources management.
- Competency Assurance: Ensure the engineering maturity and right level of competency for the daily operation and business development.
- Sales Support: Provide support to the Sales and Bid Team for the pre-sales and bid support over the Pacific region.
- Opportunity Capture: Collaborate with different entities to capture new opportunities and customers.
- Process Adherence: Ensure the company Engineering process and practice are followed properly.
- Quality Maintenance: Maintain the quality of works and ensure the engineering initiatives are well communicated and achieved.
- Team Leadership: Lead the engineering team and commit to the key activities.
- Design Support: Support the design review and technical offer.
- Cost Validation: Validate the cost estimation and the commercial offer.
- Code Review: Review code for clarity and good coding standards.
- Mobile Development: Design and build mobile applications using Flutter frameworks.
- Technical Architecture: Work closely with other technical specialists for the technical architecture of features.
- Feature Definition: Collaborate with and guide other team members to define app features and dependencies.
- Quality Assurance: Ensure the quality and performance of the application to specifications.
- Problem Solving: Identify potential problems and resolve application performance bottlenecks.
- App Publishing: Publish applications on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
- App Updates: Design and implement application updates.
2. Head of Engineering Details
- Organization Building: Build the right organization to deliver on company goals and OKRs.
- Team Development: Develop and grow a high-velocity delivery team focused on building the right work at the right quality at the right time.
- System Development: Drive the vision, strategy, and implementation of developing new systems and the ongoing improvements of current systems.
- Platform Stability: Be responsible for feature deployment, the stability of the business’s core platform, and the overall quality of the business’s application architecture.
- Culture Building: Be a key stakeholder in building a company-wide culture of service, accountability, growth, and collaboration.
- Talent Attraction: Drive the development of a team and culture that makes TA a magnet for top talent.
- Delivery Optimization: Lead the development of effective delivery practices, team structures, and team behaviors.
- Team Strategy: Be effective working with a blended team of in-office, remote, and off-shore resources, and have strategies for building teams that are not always physically co-located.
- Investment Balancing: Strategically balance investment in the architecture, ‘ilities’, and non-functional requirements of systems while delivering on an aggressive slate of product features.
- Mentorship: Mentor and coach managers and ICs to create healthy and high-velocity engineering teams.
- Representation: Represent the engineering team in clients customer conversations, course-grained planning, quarterly road mapping sessions, BOD meetings, etc.
- Career Coaching: Coach direct reports to have a positive impact on the organization and chart a fulfilling career path.
- Vision Collaboration: Collaborate with engineers, designers, product managers, and senior leadership to turn vision into a tangible roadmap every quarter.
- Project Management: Collaborate with Product and Engineering to break down complex projects into smaller pieces and iterate on design and implementation.
- Work Facilitation: Facilitate the prioritization, sequencing, and staffing of work for the team.
- Quality Assurance: Responsible for maintaining a high-quality bar for everything the team ships.
3. Head of Engineering Responsibilities
- Team Leadership: Lead a team of high-performing engineers.
- Performance Management: Responsible for the overall performance of engineering teams and helping to build great products.
- Talent Development: Work closely with the engineering managers to build and lead a team of engineers through hiring, coaching, mentoring, feedback, and career development.
- Strategic Collaboration: Work closely with the product leadership team (Moe & Jordan).
- Vision Planning: Support strategic planning for product vision and work closely with the Head of Product to define timelines for new product teams to help achieve end-of-2022 goals.
- Process Evolution: Evolving engineering processes to keep delivering customer value at speed.
- Standardization: Ensuring consistency across teams for role responsibilities and levels and enhancing onboarding experience.
- Inclusivity Focus: Build a diverse and inclusive team.
- Diversity Advocacy: Work with People Lead to drive this initiative forward and be a champion for this across the business.
- Maintenance Oversight: Oversight of the planned preventative maintenance program and reactive maintenance, ensuring all works are carried out to the standards required in appropriate timescales.
- Process Improvement: Reviewing existing departmental systems and processes, propose and implement improvements.
- Budget Management: Managing departmental budgets of approximately £2 million per annum.
- Estate Management: Management of the Estate through a long-term vision of maintenance, estate development, and life cycle planning, informing capital and operational budget planning.
- Safety Compliance: Working closely with the Head of Occupational Safety and Health to promote and ensure compliance.
- IT Leadership: Operational and leading management as well as coordination and development of the entire IT department.
- Tool Development: Planning & further development of internal tools (MERN stack) and store solutions (PHP based on Shopware).
- Architecture Planning: Planning, creation and implementation of IT architectures.
4. Head of Engineering Accountabilities
- Team Oversight: Preside over the entire Front end and Back end development teams, Mobile team, UX/UI, and Data with a total of up to 80 people.
- Process Building: Partner with all levels of the organization to build processes and programs that scale the platform.
- Team Management: Manage the day-to-day activities of the engineering teams as well as the management and execution of site/software development.
- Resource Management: Manage the department's staffing, resources, and mentoring, and maintain a best-in-class engineering department.
- Functional Delivery: Leads the engineering team in the delivery of platform functionality through a mix of development software and helps the team achieve and surpass departmental goals.
- Policy Ownership: Take ownership of the engineering policy, guidelines, and any associated documents.
- Resource Optimization: Oversee the optimal application of engineering resources in order to meet product development and consumer requirements and ensure the implementation of agile processes that support site/software development processes.
- C-Level Integration: Close cooperation with the C-Level.
- Engineering Integration: Integrating and leading all engineering teams, including the factory Manufacturing Engineering team.
- DFA Management: Perform/lead resolution of DFA (Design for Assembly) issues, oversee NPI builds, help define WI and train operators, drive root cause analysis of problems found during assembly and test.
- Testing Oversight: Perform/lead testing, validating, modifying, and implementing manufacturing tests as defined in a manufacturing test document.
- SOP Management: Perform/lead SOP and WI preparation, process optimization, process issue solving/failure analysis, and overall yield data analysis and improvement for 1st pass yield UPH.
- NPI Coordination: Focused on NPI builds, coordinates with NPI on-site team Customer Engineering design team, and R&D Team.
- Project Leadership: Lead New projects with related internal/external teams to launch on time.
5. Head of Engineering Functions
- Talent Strategy: Hire, develop, and retain leaders and senior technical leaders on the team to drive organizational strategy and goals.
- Career Development: Participate and lead career development conversations, giving and receiving feedback, and providing technical and leadership suggestions to senior engineers or managers.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate closely with key stakeholders, Product, Design, and Sales to deliver results and navigate challenges or roadblocks in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
- Accountability Management: Hold yourself and the managers reporting to you accountable for the inspection, oversight, prioritization, and delivery of the results needed by the organization.
- Visionary Leadership: Establish and drive a long-term vision as well as innovation in a new and emerging space, and evangelize the organization to drive the business forward.
- Strategy Communication: Regularly communicate the engineering perspective to the strategy and goal-setting of the organization.
- Project Execution: Drives all engineering activities to execute projects and manages development budgets.
- Team Coordination: Leads cross-functional teams in engineering and validation activities (electrical, mechanical, systems).
- Planning Skills: Defines project plans and schedules.
- Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Collaborates with sales, supply management, product design, industrial design, field operations, and manufacturing groups.
- Conflict Resolution: Identifies and resolves conflicts.
- Technical Leadership: Leading all aspects of development and all technical staff for this fastest-growing product line.
- Team Management: Manage three teams - Vehicle Cybersecurity team with HW and SW expertise, Cloud Security and DevOps teams.
- Partner Engagement: Engage 3rd party development partners and suppliers to achieve the highest levels of efficiency.
- Product Development: Work closely with the product management teams when developing and delivering new product launches.
- Diversity Leadership: Hire and retain a world-class and diverse team that will push the boundaries of innovation to deliver a strategic differentiator.
- Architecture Strategy: Lay out the technology architecture for both immediate and long-term growth.
- Vision Promotion: Evangelize the vision internally and externally
Job Role FAQs
What is a job role?
A job role refers to the duties, responsibilities, and expectations associated with a specific position within an organization. It explains what tasks an employee performs, how they contribute to team objectives, and how their work supports the company’s overall goals.
What are the typical responsibilities of a job role?
Typical job role responsibilities include completing daily tasks, collaborating with team members, making decisions, and meeting performance targets. For example, a software developer may write code, fix bugs, review pull requests, and collaborate with product teams.
What is the difference between a job role and a job title?
A job title is the official name of a position, such as Marketing Manager or Software Engineer. A job role describes the actual duties, responsibilities, and expectations associated with that position.
Why are clearly defined job roles important?
Clearly defined job roles help organizations improve productivity, reduce workplace confusion, and ensure accountability. When employees understand their responsibilities and expectations, teams can collaborate more effectively.
How do job roles support career development?
Understanding different job roles helps professionals identify career paths and the skills required for advancement. By learning the expectations of various roles, individuals can build relevant skills and plan long-term career growth.
Editorial Process
Lamwork content is developed through structured review of publicly available job postings and documented hiring trends.
Editorial operations are managed by Thanh Huyen, Managing Editor, with research direction and final oversight by Lam Nguyen, Founder & Editorial Lead. Content is periodically reviewed to reflect observable labor market changes.