Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering (Hands-On)

Opportunity overview

Blüm Health is a fast-growing digital health software company founded by Clinicians and Software Engineers to break down the barriers of healthcare innovation. A bit about us; we've spent the start of our journey investing in a great approach to software architecture, focusing on developer experience and making our projects great code bases to work with. What we have achieved empowers our development team to spend most of their time innovating instead of managing tech debt.

The Head of Engineering role is the technical centre of gravity for that delivery. You'll own engineering quality and predictability across multiple concurrent projects, protect the shared platform that lets us move quickly without breaking things, and stay hands-on in the code where it has the most leverage. It's a role for someone who wants to shape how a team builds, not just what it builds. Is this role of interest to you? Reach out today to discuss this further.

Brief details of the role

• Hybrid: Yes, with a certain number of days required in the London office (next to Tower Bridge) each month
• Tech stack: C#, .Net, Azure, PostgreSQL, Azure SQL, Entity Framework, GraphQL, React
• Projects: Private Healthcare and Public Healthcare clients including NHS
• Greenfield work: Yes
• Reports to: Chief Technical Officer

Blüm is a UK leader in clinical innovation, realising, designing, and delivering scalable software products. We collaborate with both Public and Private sector clients, including the NHS, to optimise the clinician and patient experience, whilst looking at new ways of analysing existing processes to make them more efficient. Our mission is to connect Healthcare excellence with technological innovation, accelerating the transition to a world filled with digital health solutions.

We believe in putting the best people together and empowering them to create, deliver and excel. We celebrate diversity of thought, interest, perspectives, and ideas, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender orientation, sexual orientation, or national origin. To understand more about Blüm Health click here. You can also visit https://www.blumhealth.co.uk/ and follow us on LinkedIn @blumhealth.

The ideal candidate is a technical leader who hasn't stopped building. You'll set the pace and the standard for engineering across the business. Through the code you write, the reviews you give, and the leads you develop, while making sure what we commit to clients is what we can actually deliver.

Who you are

Leadership

Promote diversity, inclusion, and equality of opportunity, respecting difference and external experience. Welcome and respond to challenges from others, despite any conflicting pressures to give in to them. Stand by, promote, or defend your own and the team's decisions where needed. Some key leadership qualities that a Head of Engineering should possess include:

• Technical authority without gatekeeping: Deep expertise across the stack, used to raise the ceiling for everyone else rather than to centralise decisions. You should be the person others want in the room on a hard problem, not the person they have to wait for.
• Scaling through others: The ability to identify and empower trusted technical leads who can run teams day-to-day, reducing reliance on any single person for reviews or critical knowledge (including yourself!).
• Comfort holding a line: Quality gates, security posture and release readiness are yours to defend. That sometimes means an unpopular conversation with delivery or with a client, handled well.
• Coaching instinct: Growing engineers is part of the job, not an overflow activity. You reinforce an open culture where any engineer can raise an issue.

Seeing the big picture

As the senior technical leader in the engineering function, it is important to understand the goals and direction of the company and how engineering decisions serve them. This means holding architecture choices against commercial and operational constraints rather than ideology; monolith, modular, serverless or queues based on what the problem actually needs. To be aware of the bigger picture, a Head of Engineering can:

• Participate in decision-making and offer ideas for the direction of the wider engineering function
• Understand where the business is winning and losing, and what that implies for platform investment
• Keep an eye on delivery performance (estimate versus actual, rework, incident patterns) and act on what it shows
• Research the digital health industry and stay up to date with the latest trends and developments
• Network with other professionals in the field and gain insights into the industry

Communication and influencing

Communicate with others in a clear, honest, and enthusiastic way to build trust. Explain complex issues in a way that is easy to understand. Deliver difficult messages with clarity and sensitivity, being persuasive when required. Remain open-minded and impartial in discussions, whilst respecting the diverse interests and opinions of others.

For this role specifically, that extends to client-facing work: supporting bid and specification responses with credible feasibility assessments, joining technical deep dives where risk or complexity is high.

Requirements

We are looking for an engineering leader who enjoys new challenges and creative problem solving, and who is comfortable operating across different projects in a fast-moving team. You'll be someone who treats estimation as a discipline rather than a ritual, and who applies critical thinking to high-level requirements whilst optimising delivery routes within operational constraints (security, resilience, compliance).

Your Experience

• 10+ years of relevant work experience, including several in a technical leadership role
• Expertise in Object Oriented Design and Database Design
• Proven experience leading engineering delivery across multiple parallel workstreams
• A track record of stewarding shared platform components and preventing fragmentation across projects
• Extensive experience using C#, .Net, TypeScript, Azure, AWS, Node.js
• Experience of configuring and developing databases (SQL)
• Experience building APIs (GraphQL / REST) and frontends using React
• Strong DevOps and release engineering background: CI/CD reliability, repeatable and traceable deployments, controlled database change management, environment consistency
• Security-by-design instincts: authenticated API boundaries, least privilege for production access, safe data access patterns, meaningful audit logging
• Experience establishing monitoring and telemetry, and turning incidents and RCA into systemic fixes rather than repeat firefighting
• Experience writing, performing and optimising software tests including ensuring responsiveness, performance, and resilience of applications, leveraging SonarQube in this process
• Experience with Agile or Scrum methodologies, including planning, estimation, sprinting and reviews
• Ability to self-manage your work and set direction for others as part of the wider team

Additional Skills & Experience (good to have)

• Experience using Flutter, Electron
• Experience in Containerisation (Docker)
• Experience in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep)
• Experience delivering software in a quality-managed or regulated environment
• Healthcare interoperability experience (FHIR, HL7)
• Experience in a consultancy or agency model where technical decisions carry commercial consequences

Responsibilities

• Own engineering delivery predictability — tracking estimate versus actual, calibrating estimation, and giving early warning when delivery risk emerges
• Protect shared platform components and business-critical logic as multiple teams contribute
• Contribute hands-on where it has the most leverage: complex backend areas, integration hazards, critical flows, and spikes on high-risk unknowns
• Set and enforce code review discipline focused on business logic correctness, security assumptions and failure behaviours — not just style
• Drive architecture and integration decisions appropriate to constraints, and keep them briefly documented and current
• Own CI/CD reliability and release integrity, including database change governance
• Embed security best practice and operational readiness across the engineering function
• Support incident response and root cause analysis for production issues
• Support the CTO, Operations and Product teams with solution outlines, technical bid sections and feasibility checks
• Coach engineers and develop technical leads; build repeatable playbooks for integrations, secure patterns, release readiness and troubleshooting

Benefits

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Private Health Insurance (Vitality)
• Dental Cover + Optical Cover (Vitality)
• Electric Car Salary Sacrifice Scheme (Octopus)
• Cycle to work scheme
• NEST pension scheme
• Flexible working hours

Blüm Technologies Group Ltd is an Equal Opportunity Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, colour, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Blüm Technologies Group Ltd is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. Please, no phone calls or emails. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Blüm Technologies Group Ltd via email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Blüm Technologies Group Ltd. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Blüm Technologies Group Ltd as a result of the referral or through other means.