About Phorest

Would you like to create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers? Phorest powers over 11,000 hair and beauty salons in Ireland, UK, Germany, Australia, Finland, USA, Canada, UAE and Netherlands and the platform processes 7 million appointments a month for hair and beauty consumers. Phorest is the number 1 salon software brand for premium independent salons in those markets and our next goal is to become a platform upon which other companies can build applications for premium salons.

Our system touches every point of the salon experience. We have the in-salon software desktop application, Phorest Go (the native staff application), online bookings website for salons, and custom native apps per salon. In a typical month, Phorest processes 3 million appointments and we send over 3 million SMS and 4 million emails. We process 200k online bookings per month and over 150 custom built white label native apps.

The Opportunity

Phorest is entering a new chapter of growth. As our global customer base expands, the systems and infrastructure that power our business must scale to match – supporting innovation without compromising stability.

The Director of Engineering – Business Foundations sits at the center of this evolution. You will lead the teams that form Phorest’s operational backbone – infrastructure, data engineering, security, and business systems – ensuring that everything we build is reliable, scalable, and built to last.

Working closely with the CTO, Director of Engineering and cross-functional leaders across Product, Operations, and Go-To-Market, you’ll define how Phorest’s technology foundations enable growth at global scale. You’ll lead through people, shaping technical direction and engineering culture that deliver lasting impact with pace and precision.

What You'll Do

Leadership and Team Development

• Lead and mentor Head of Engineering, Engineering Managers, Senior Engineering Managers, and Senior ICs across the Foundations and Enablement domain.

• Foster a culture of delivery, accountability, and technical excellence.

• Partner with the CTO and senior engineering leaders to shape the long-term org structure and talent strategy.

• Foster a culture of innovation and experimentation, enabling teams to safely test emerging AI technologies that improve customer experience and internal productivity.

• Drive pace, diversity, learning, and inclusion as cornerstones of Phorest’s engineering culture.

Platform Scalability and Health

• Lead initiatives to scale and strengthen Phorest’s core infrastructure, ensuring global reliability and resilience.

• Oversee platform cost management, uptime, and performance, including AWS hosting strategy and infrastructure evolution.

• Drive a culture of observability, operational ownership, and continuous improvement – ensuring teams have visibility into system health and can detect and resolve issues before customers feel them.

• Define and evolve on-call standards that balance reliability with sustainability, creating clear processes for incident response, learning reviews, and follow-through.

• Ensure the ongoing health of foundational systems through proactive upgrades, monitoring, and thoughtful technical debt management.

Data Engineering and Platform Evolution

• Develop a world-class data architecture powering analytics, reporting, and cross-system data flow.

• Build and maintain robust pipelines that support real-time insights and data-driven decision-making across the company.

• Lead on data governance, ensuring accuracy, accessibility, and security of all Phorest data assets.

• Partner with product and business teams to leverage data for features, customer insights, and growth.

IT Systems and Information Security

• Protect Phorest’s platform, customer data, and internal systems through strong security and operational practices.

• Oversee the reliability and usability of company-wide applications and tools, ensuring a seamless, productive experience for all teams.

• Partner across functions to uphold compliance standards while driving responsible, everyday use of AI tools that enhance productivity and decision-making.

• Build the systems, policies, and education that make Phorest an AI-confident company, where employees can safely experiment, automate, and innovate in their work.

• Lead incident response readiness – ensuring clear processes for detection, escalation, and learning.

• Continuously assess and strengthen both the company’s security posture and its internal technology ecosystem.

Lead Business Systems and Go-to-Market Tooling

• Build technology that enables scale – not through headcount, but through smarter systems and automation.

• Lead development of scalable tools, integrations, and systems that enhance the efficiency and quality of key customer and operational processes – from onboarding to ongoing success – reducing friction and enabling scale across the full lifecycle.

• Partner closely with regional and functional teams to identify and remove operational bottlenecks, streamline workflows and improve data flow across systems.

• Drive automation and system improvements that reduce manual overhead and increase operational agility.

• Ensure internal tooling and external point-based tools can scale in line with Phorest’s growth and product expansion.

Partner and Vendor Management

• Build and maintain strong relationships with technology vendors and partners.

• Negotiate favourable contracts and ensure Phorest maximizes ROI from every partnership.

• Align partner capabilities with Phorest’s technical roadmap and growth strategy.

• Collaborate with external partners on joint initiatives that strengthen our infrastructure and operational effectiveness.

What You'll Bring to Phorest

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including 5+ in leadership managing managers.

• Strong executive presence, a great communicator, an ability to make and influence decisions at all levels.

• Proven success leading infrastructure, data engineering, or platform teams at scale.

• Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS), data architecture, and modern deployment practices.

• Experience with business systems (CRM, ERP, or similar) and cross-functional technical collaboration.

• Strong grounding in information security, compliance, and governance frameworks.

• Strategic thinker with the ability to translate business needs into actionable technology roadmaps.

• Skilled in managing vendors and building long-term technology partnerships.

• Exceptional leadership presence with the ability to coach, motivate, and develop senior engineering leaders.

What Success Looks Like

In your first 12 months, success will mean:

• A clear, communicated strategy for the Foundations & Enablement domain aligned with business goals.

• A more scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure supporting Phorest globally.

• Become a key leader in our scaling strategy, driving measurable impact.

• Enhanced data infrastructure powering analytics and smarter decision-making.

• Strengthened security posture and improved incident response readiness.

• A strong leadership bench and healthy, high-performing teams across the domain.

Optimised vendor partnerships delivering clear ROI and alignment to Phorest’s long-term vision.

Who You Are

You are a first-principles thinker who thrives on turning complexity into clarity. You see patterns in systems, question assumptions, and build from fundamentals - always seeking the simplest, most scalable path to impact.

You’re a multiplier of others. You create leverage through people, systems, and clarity of purpose - developing leaders who raise the bar for those around them. Your influence shows up not in how much you personally deliver, but in how much your teams can achieve because of you.

You think long-term, act with pace, and stay calm under pressure. You combine strategic depth with practical execution, balancing innovation with reliability.
You’re deeply collaborative - as comfortable talking architecture as you are discussing customer outcomes or commercial strategy. You believe that engineering leadership is about driving meaningful business results, not just writing great code.

Above all, you care about impact and integrity. You lead with curiosity, clarity, and conviction - ensuring that what we build today becomes the foundation for how Phorest scales tomorrow.

Benefits

🧘Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.

💰As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.

🚵🏿 We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.

🦸‍♀️We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.

🍼We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.

🌳We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.

🏠Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Want to learn more about Phorest? Check out nothingventured.rocks for our blog and Insights on building an evergreen company from the team here at Phorest.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.