Head of IT

Our Engineering story

Catawiki operates in a huge market which brings a lot of unique challenges and opportunities. Having more than 12+ million monthly visitors, Catawiki’s Engineering team takes the stability and the scalability of our systems and applications seriously.

We strive to build scalable systems that will perform well under load, by deciding what algorithms and data structures our programs use, by always estimating and benchmarking our system’s performance, and by choosing the right technologies. Our Business IT team is a central function that supports the entirety of the business.

So what does a Head of IT do at Catawiki?

The impact that you will have, as one of our Engineering Managers, is massive; You will play an integral part in structuring processes, building on our high-performance culture, and shaping how engineering happens at Catawiki. The 3 most important aspects of your job will be:

Strategy & Planning:

• Aligning closely with our People Team shared goals within your domain and areas of expertise.
• Facilitating alignment with other stakeholder teams for successful delivery of broad company-wide initiatives.
• Linking technical efforts to business goals; You know how to shape, mold and develop the Business IT team to ensure they are moving in the same direction as the business.
• Key contact for our various Managed Service Providers and vendors that supplement support of the business through specialized technology.

Engineering excellence:

• Communication across teams; You are the first point of technical contact for their topic.
• You will lead, manage, and plan team capacity as they work on challenges around scale, improving our microservice architecture and implementing new features.
• Act as a business partner for horizontal, cross-team efforts that span across multiple teams or the entire organization.

Team Building & Management:

• You play a leading role in appraisals, reviews, coaching and mentoring, ensuring the team feels engaged and valued.
• You think actively about both the professional development of the existing team and the best way to attract and retain the best new talent. 
• Help us design and run a high-performance organization through technology, by actively participating in continuous improvement of organizational metrics.

What you’ll bring 

• You have relevant experience in a variety of contexts, during which you have built scalable, robust, and fault-tolerant systems adding tangible value to the business and its users.  
• Experience in leading IT Support and IT Engineering teams by goal setting and strategic direction.
• A proven leader who has scaled up and managed within a consumer-facing Online business, playing a key role in aligning the technology strategy with the business objectives. Ideally, you have a background in e-commerce but this is not a prerequisite.
• Experienced in developing a clear vision and direction for your team. You’ll be well versed in planning the career path of team members, ensuring engagement and inspiration.
• A Role model for Business IT at Catawiki. You’re involved in conferences, events or meetups about best practices in Business IT and team building.
• You think in terms of the value added to the business and users and know the trade-offs to make between product and tech.
• You’ve progressed into working in cloud-only businesses & SaaS environments without the drag of physical infrastructure management.

As our engineering group is expanding we are looking for structuring and solidifying engineering leadership to match our growth. As a result, we are looking for managers used to fast-paced growth and building solutions that scale. The role reports to the CPO, collaborates closely with other department leaders, and also the Commercial side of the business.