| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Senior management |
| Reports to | Chief Technology Officer |
| Direct reports | Engineering Manager, DevOps Manager, QA Manager, Principal Engineer |
| Experience | 12 to 15 years in software engineering, with 4 or more years leading several teams in a product company |
Head of Engineering job description template
Copy this job description, replace the text in square brackets and post it on your careers page or a job portal.
Job title: Head of Engineering
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
The Head of Engineering runs the engineering function of a product company or startup once the team has grown beyond what the founders can manage directly. They own how software gets built and shipped: team structure, hiring, delivery process, code quality, uptime and engineering spend. In many Indian startups this is the senior-most full-time engineering leader below the CTO or a technical co-founder. A good Head of Engineering ships the roadmap reliably, keeps production stable and builds a team that grows without constant firefighting.
Key responsibilities
- Agree the quarterly engineering plan with the product head, including roadmap commitments, platform work and a fixed share of capacity for tech debt.
- Design team structure as the company grows, deciding when to split teams, form platform or QA groups and appoint new managers.
- Own engineering hiring, from job descriptions and interview loops to offer approvals and campus or lateral hiring targets.
- Set the delivery process: sprint cadence, definition of done, code review rules, release trains and change approvals.
- Define uptime and incident expectations for production, and lead the response to severity 1 incidents that hit customers.
- Manage the engineering budget, covering cloud infrastructure, software licences and contractors, and approve spend within delegated limits.
- Review architecture for major features and platform changes with principal engineers before build starts.
- Hold monthly one-on-ones with each engineering manager and skip-level conversations with engineers across teams.
- Lead appraisal calibration and promotion decisions for engineering, and act early on performance problems.
- Report engineering health to the founders or board: delivery against plan, incidents, attrition, hiring and cost.
Requirements
- B.E. or B.Tech in Computer Science or a related branch, M.Tech or MCA
- A strong programming background in a mainstream stack such as Java, Go, Node.js or Python
- 12 to 15 years in software engineering, with 4 or more years leading several teams in a product company
KRAs and KPIs for a Head of Engineering
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Roadmap delivery | Committed quarterly roadmap items shipped on time, with every slip explained and replanned within one week |
| Production stability | Monthly uptime of customer-facing systems at or above the agreed target, such as 99.9 percent |
| Release health | Change failure rate below 15 percent of production deployments each month |
| Hiring | Quarterly engineering hiring plan met, with new joiners shipping to production within their first 60 days |
| Engineering cost | Cloud and tooling spend within the annual plan, measured per active customer or per transaction |
| Team health | Regretted engineering attrition below the company target and engagement survey actions closed each quarter |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: GitHub or GitLab, Jira or Linear, AWS or GCP, Datadog, New Relic or Grafana, PagerDuty or Opsgenie, Notion or Confluence.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Vice President Engineering, Chief Technology Officer
Interview questions for a Head of Engineering
- The founders want a big feature in six weeks and the team says twelve. How do you handle it?
- At what point would you split one team into two, and how would you do it?
- Tell me about the worst production incident you managed. What did you change afterwards?
- What engineering metrics would you report to the board, and why those?
- How do you hire senior engineers when larger companies are chasing the same people?
- One of your best engineers wants to become a manager but struggles with people. What do you do?
Managing a Head of Engineering in ZeniaHR
Hire and manage your information technology team in one place
Post the role, onboard the new hire, and track attendance, leave and KRAs in ZeniaHR. Free for your first 50 employees.
Book a free demoSee pricingFrequently asked questions
What does a head of engineering do?
A head of engineering leads all software engineering teams in a company. They plan what engineering can deliver each quarter, organize teams and processes, hire engineers and managers, keep production stable, manage engineering spend and report on delivery and incidents to the CTO or founders. In smaller startups they may still review code and architecture themselves.
What is the difference between a head of engineering and a CTO?
The CTO owns technology strategy: what to build, which platforms to bet on and how technology supports the business. The head of engineering owns execution: teams, hiring, delivery, quality and uptime. In early startups one person often does both, and as the company grows the roles separate, with the head of engineering reporting to the CTO.
How much experience do you need to become a head of engineering?
Most heads of engineering in Indian startups and product companies have 12 or more years in software, including several years leading engineering managers or more than one team. Startups sometimes appoint younger leaders who scaled a team from a handful of engineers, because a record of shipping and hiring matters more than the number of years.