This is a Permanent, Full Time vacancy that will close in {x} days at {xx:xx} BST.
The Vacancy
About IRIS
IRIS is one of the UK’s largest privately held software companies, delivering mission-critical solutions to businesses, schools and public sector organisations for over 40 years.
With 3,000 colleagues across the UK, Ireland, Romania, North America and India, we are entering an exciting growth phase — scaling through innovation, cloud transformation and strategic acquisition.
Our mission is simple: to simplify the lives of organisations through powerful, intelligent software.
The Opportunity
We are seeking a strategic and technically accomplished Associate Director of Engineering to lead the technology vision, architecture and delivery of our Education-focused SaaS products.
This is a senior leadership role responsible for:
Leading a 30+ person engineering organisation (6 direct reports)
Shaping cloud-native SaaS architecture
Embedding AI into engineering practices and product development
Delivering secure, scalable, customer-centric solutions
You will be instrumental in building our AI-first engineering culture modernising tooling, accelerating delivery, and enhancing product intelligence.
What You’ll Do
Drive Engineering Strategy
Define and execute architecture roadmaps aligned to business goals
Champion AI and automation across the SDLC
Ensure scalable, API-first, cloud-native platform design
Prevent platform duplication and optimise reuse
Lead & Inspire Teams
Build, mentor and scale high-performing engineering leaders
Establish strong development frameworks and growth pathways
Create a culture of accountability, innovation and continuous improvement
Deliver With Excellence
Partner with Product to bring AI-enhanced features to market
Oversee delivery across multiple concurrent initiatives
Ensure operational excellence in deployment, monitoring and resilience
Champion Security & Governance
Drive secure engineering and compliance (GDPR, SOC2)
Ensure risk-aware practices across architecture and delivery
Support responsible AI governance
What You’ll Bring
10+ years in software engineering, including senior leadership experience
Proven SaaS delivery on AWS and/or Azure
Experience modernising legacy platforms into scalable cloud-native solutions
Strong understanding of DevOps, SRE, API architecture and AI integration
Demonstrated ability to embed AI tools to improve engineering velocity
Commercial awareness and customer-first mindset
Why Join Us?
Strategic influence in a high-growth division
Opportunity to shape an AI-first engineering culture
Work on impactful Education technology
Leadership scope across architecture, people and innovation
Backed by a strong M&A growth strategy
If you’re a technologist who can scale engineering with vision, discipline and an AI-forward mindset we’d love to hear from you!
Please note:
We occasionally close vacancies early in the event that we receive a high volume of applications. Therefore we recommend you apply as soon as possible.
About IRIS
As one of the UK’s largest privately held software companies, IRIS Software Group exists to simplify the lives of businesses, schools and organisations.
IRIS provides software solutions and services that substantially enhance operational compliance, efficiency and accuracy, empowering the users of our technology to look forward with certainty and confidence.
Over 4 million parents use our software to connect with their child’s school, 18% of UK employees are paid via an IRIS payroll solution, 50,000 SMEs use IRIS cloud bookkeeping and 21,000 firms rely on us for legislative compliance.
Our operational software is the invisible but essential beating heart of our customers’ businesses, supporting them in a range of objectives, from maintaining legislative compliance to boosting engagement with stakeholders and enhancing productivity.
It’s vital these mission-critical functions work first time, every time.
That’s why IRIS helps businesses run the tough stuff, stay compliant and get operational tasks done right first time, every time – so they can focus on productivity and growth.
IRIS is a company built on hiring the best people; our people are our greatest assets.
They enable us to be the innovative, market-leading, and high-performing company that we are today.
We’re delighted to be certified as a Great Place to Work and one of the UK’s Best Workplaces for Women.
These accolades confirm that our employees have a consistently positive experience at IRIS, with the certifications considering employee wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, trust in management, effective communication and recognition/reward.
IRIS is committed to engaging, rewarding and empowering our employees, and this is central to what we do.
This is why we work to create an environment where employees feel like they are part of a team.
Why work for IRIS?
The Benefits
Developing your career
We believe in creating a culture of engagement and reward to develop your potential and offer long-term career success. We do this by:
Supporting our managers to be great leaders, providing inspirational management resources and offering dedicated management development training.
Rewarding individual excellence through dedicated initiatives and Employee Awards for demonstrating our values.
Offering regular training and development programmes tailored to each employee’s development needs and providing a commitment to a ‘learning culture’ which shares knowledge, best practice and our long-standing expertise between employees.
We’re committed to a culture of continuous improvement and listen to our employees via regular feedback sessions and employee engagement surveys.
Our employees love the colleagues they work with. We promote a positive environment where our people feel comfortable, make friends and support each other.
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