Head of Engineering, Commerce

The role

You will lead engineering delivery for the commerce product area at WPP, working on commerce marketing systems and the data flows and pipelines that connect to them. You will also lead the use of AI-driven development practices across the software development lifecycle and grow senior engineers.

What you will do

• Lead engineering delivery across teams building commerce marketing capabilities.
• Establish team mentorship paths aimed at incorporating agents into day-to-day work.
• Be accountable for the career growth and development of senior engineers and their teams.
• Act as the primary engineering partner to Product, Design, Commercial, and Delivery stakeholders.
• Translate business requirements into engineering outcomes and technical product direction.
• Drive alignment with engineering leads and cross-functional partners to deliver integrated roadmaps.
• Take ownership across the full software development lifecycle, from discovery through release and post-production maintenance.
• Ensure systems are reliable, performant, and able to operate under real-world conditions.
• Lead the application and adaptation of AI-driven development practices.
• Help inform the roadmap as part of the product development process.

Required qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience
• Proven experience delivering complex, operational systems at scale
• Strong experience with APIs, distributed systems, and integrations
• Experience working with systems that integrate with external platforms or partner ecosystems
• Strong understanding of system performance, latency, and production reliability
• Hands-on experience delivering AI-enabled product features into production, including integrating LLMs and generative AI services
• Strong experience with modern cloud data warehouse and lakehouse platforms (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift)
• Solid understanding of data modelling, ELT/ETL pipelines, and orchestration tooling (e.g. dbt, Airflow), including data quality, lineage, and governance
• Deep experience architecting and operating systems on major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, and/or GCP)
• Strong knowledge of cloud-native architecture patterns, including microservices, containers and Kubernetes, serverless, and event-driven design
• Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD, observability, cloud security and IAM, and cloud cost optimisation (FinOps)
• Demonstrated ability to lead delivery in multi-team, dependency-heavy environments

About the company

WPP is a growth partner for global brands, combining media intelligence, creativity, production, enterprise solutions and strategic counsel across 100+ markets. Its Data & Technology Solutions organisation builds the WPP Open AI-powered marketing platform.