About Phorest

Would you like to create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers? Phorest Salon Software 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

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Business Systems team within the Foundations pillar at Phorest. This is an exciting time to join, as we advance one of our key strategic imperatives - enhancing our business systems to enable Phorest to scale with greater operational excellence. This team builds the internal systems, data flows, and automation that power our operational excellence — from customer onboarding to billing and beyond.

Your mission: enable scale not through headcount, but through smarter systems and automation. You’ll lead a team that builds tools and integrations connecting Phorest’s internal and customer-facing systems, laying the foundation for scalable, data driven growth, reducing manual work and improving the quality and consistency of our operational processes.

This role is ideal for an experienced engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of technology, operations, and business process improvement. You’ll collaborate closely with our Customer Experience, Finance, and Commercial teams to streamline workflows, improve data accuracy, and ensure our systems scale with the company’s growth.

We’re looking for someone who can balance technical depth with business impact — someone who can simplify complexity, create clarity, and empower a team to deliver meaningful results.

What You'll Do

• Lead & Develop the Team: Manage and mentor a team of backend and systems engineers focused on building and maintaining internal systems and integrations. Create an environment of continuous learning, accountability, and collaboration. Support career growth through clear expectations, feedback, and coaching.

• Drive System & Process Improvement: Lead development of scalable internal tools and integrations that improve how Phorest operates day-to-day. Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (Operations, CX, Finance, Product) to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for automation. Translate business problems into technical solutions that reduce manual work, improve data accuracy, and increase visibility.

• Provide Technical Leadership: Guide architectural and technical decisions, ensuring systems are robust, maintainable, and scalable. Stay hands-on enough to understand the team’s challenges and unblock where needed (around 30–40% of your time). Promote best practices in code quality, testing, observability, and security.

• Balance Short- and Long-Term Impact: Help the team balance immediate operational needs with longer-term system improvements. Define success metrics for internal tooling and system changes, ensuring measurable business outcomes. Collaborate with your Product Manager to prioritise initiatives that move the needle.

• Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a trusted partner to regional and functional leaders, ensuring technical solutions align with business objectives. Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, creating shared understanding of priorities and trade-offs.

• Build for Scale & Reliability: Ensure internal tooling, data pipelines, and integrations can scale in line with Phorest’s growth. Drive standardisation, reducing system fragility and improving operational resilience.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a team leadership or management role.

• Comfortable leading through ambiguity - creating clarity where paths aren’t always well-defined, and guides teams through evolving priorities with confidence.

• Strong people management skills: experienced in coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers.

• Proven ability to lead engineering teams working on business systems, internal tools, or backend integrations.

• Technical background in object-oriented design, preferably Java or similar JVM languages.

• Experience designing and scaling API-driven or event-based systems.

• Comfortable working in a cross-functional environment — collaborating with operations, CX, finance, or product teams.

• Excellent communication skills, able to translate technical detail into compelling narratives that bring people both technical and non technical alike on the journey with you to achieve real business impact.

• Pragmatic and outcome-driven: you focus on the 90% solution that delivers impact faster.

• You’re an adept Leader experienced in leading teams through change, demonstrating and fostering resilience through a face paced and evolving environment.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with Salesforce, Zendesk or similar enterprise/business systems.

• Familiarity with data integration, ETL pipelines, or system synchronisation across multiple tools.

• Exposure to internal automation platforms or workflow orchestration.

• Experience managing remote or geographically distributed teams.

• Previous work in SaaS, customer success, or operations-heavy environments.

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.