Engineering Director - Ecommerce (All Genders)

With over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier - and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

As the Engineering Director for Acquisition & Retention area, you will lead the development, delivery, and evolution of innovative, large-scale software capabilities that accelerate customer acquisition and drive meaningful retention. This role leads engineering for the systems and teams that power customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, pricing, and customer engagement. The mandate is not only to deliver business impact, but to strengthen engineering foundations, improve cross-team execution, and evolve the organization towards clearer ownership, higher quality, and faster delivery.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the engineering strategy across Acquisition & Retention in line with business priorities and customer outcomes.

• Drive simplification and scalability across systems powering loyalty, pricing, customer communications, customer data, and growth experiences.

• Improve engineering maturity across planning, execution, architecture, quality, reliability, observability, and incident management.

• Find pragmatic opportunities to use AI and automation to improve developer productivity, quality, and operational efficiency.

• Balance short-term business delivery with long-term technical sustainability and maintainability.

• Develop a comprehensive engineering strategy incorporating emerging technologies and AI-enabled delivery models.

• Ensure architectural integrity and scalability across systems.

• Implement frameworks that measure productivity improvements-cycle time, MTTR, deployment frequency, and quality KPIs.

• Own OPEX and CAPEX planning, forecasting, and budget control to ensure financial discipline and alignment with strategic priorities.

• Establish and enforce security, privacy, and compliance standards across engineering operations.

• Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, and Business teams to deliver high-impact customer experiences.

• Lead talent management, hiring, and leadership development across engineering teams.

• Cultivate a culture of innovation, transparency, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Key Tasks

• Own end-to-end engineering execution ensuring alignment with business outcomes.

• Drive adoption of AI-powered SDLC enhancements-code generation, intelligent reviews, automated documentation, and quality gates.

• Ensure system reliability, scalability, and observability through AI-assisted monitoring and operational frameworks.

• Mentor engineering leaders and architects to build high-performing teams.

• Promote cross-location and cross-domain collaboration for maximum organizational efficiency

What success looks like in this role

• Clearer engineering ownership and better collaboration across teams and domains.

• Stronger delivery predictability and improved execution quality.

• Improved system reliability, observability, and operational discipline.

• A healthier engineering culture with higher accountability, stronger managers, and better technical decision-making.

• Faster progress on customer and business priorities without compromising technical foundations.

• A more scalable engineering setup that supports long-term growth in acquisition and retention.

Skills & Experience

• Experience defining and delivering technical strategy across AdTech, MarTech, Loyalty, Pricing, and Customer Data ecosystems (experience with analytics and social media platforms is beneficial but not core).

• Experience improving engineering maturity in growing and complex organizations, including system boundary definition, ownership models, and engineering operating mechanisms.

• Strong product and business partnership, not just technical leadership.

• Effective communication, judgment, and decision-making skills, with the ability to bring clarity to complex problems.

• Demonstrated ability to work across organizational boundaries and lead through ambiguity, dependencies, and change.

• Strong architectural judgment and experience building scalable, reliable, and evolvable systems.

• Experience with AI and automation technologies that enhance engineering productivity (e.g., generative AI tooling, automated QA, AIOps).

• 15+ years of software engineering experience and 7+ years managing large engineering organizations with engineering managers and architects

Headquartered in Munich, with offices across Madrid, Krakow, Wroclaw, London and Vienna, we collaborate because we genuinely love working together - so you’ll be at the heart of an incredible, multinational team. We trust each other to get the job done, which means you’ll benefit from hybrid working, spending 60% of your time in the office and 40% at home. There’s an option to work for 20 days abroad in approved countries too.

Add to that development opportunities that help you to shape your own career path, excellent training and support, wellbeing offers, subsidised transport or bike leasing, plus 20% discount across all our products, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what sets us apart. Find out more about the specific benefits at your local office in our blog posts.

At zooplus, we believe in equal opportunity and support everyone to fulfil their potential. We recognise the power of listening and learning from each other and embrace diversity and inclusion of all.