Head of Engineering

Matrix Eastern Europe, the offshore division of Matrix IT, one of the leading global R&D services companies with more than 11,000 professionals, is looking for a Head of Engineering to join one of their teams. Their partner and client is a software vendor providing development, integration, and technical products for developers and technical professionals serving the SMB and enterprise market worldwide. They are modernizing their platform toward cloud-native, Kubernetes-based, AI-enabled delivery while continuing to support and evolve a mature product portfolio.

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, with at least 5 years managing teams of 50+ people.
• Proven track record managing distributed/offshore engineering teams, ideally including India.
• Deep experience with legacy modernization.
• Previous experience in Java development.
• Good understanding of React, Node.js, and Cloud.
• Hands-on understanding of cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and modern SaaS delivery.
• Strong people-management skills including hiring, performance management, retention, and culture-building across geographies.
• Background in a software vendor/product company.
• Ability to engage with business stakeholders (Product, Sales, Support).
• Execution-and-delivery mindset.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and long transformation timelines.
• Experience in developer tools, integration platforms, or infrastructure software.
• Track record of leading cloud/SaaS transformation.
• Familiarity with SMB and enterprise software sales cycles.
• Experience managing support functions alongside development.
• Openness to AI-driven development practices and agentic workflows.

Own end-to-end delivery:

• Own end-to-end delivery of software releases across all sites: planning, execution, quality, and on-time shipment.
• Manage cross-site coordination between India and Russia: communication rhythms, dependency management, and timezone-aware processes.
• Establish and refine development methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Kanban) across all teams.
• Drive predictable delivery through capacity planning, velocity tracking, and risk management.
• Own release management including go/no-go decisions, rollback procedures, and post-release monitoring.
• Establish and track engineering KPIs: velocity, cycle time, defect escape rate, deployment frequency.

People Leadership & Team Building:

• Lead and manage ~80 engineers, QA, and support professionals across geographies.
• Define team structure, squad composition, and reporting lines.
• Own the full hiring lifecycle: headcount planning, recruiting, interviewing, onboarding.
• Drive performance management, career development, and retention — particularly in competitive markets like India.
• Build a strong engineering culture that works across geographies, cultures, and time zones.
• Mentor team leads and senior engineers; develop the next generation of technical leaders.

Engineering Excellence & Quality:

• Enforce coding standards, code-review practices, and quality gates across legacy and modern codebases.
• Own QA strategy: test automation, coverage targets, regression management for both legacy and new code.
• Drive CI/CD maturity: build pipelines, automated testing, deployment automation.
• Manage technical debt strategically: track, prioritize, and allocate remediation capacity.
• Ensure production stability: on-call rotations, SLA adherence, incident post-mortems.

Legacy Sustainment & Modernization Execution:

• Translate the CTO’s modernization roadmap into phased implementation plans with realistic timelines.
• Lead execution of cloud migration, Kubernetes adoption, and SaaS enablement.
• Manage the legacy codebase: maintenance, security patches.