VP, Engineering at NewStore in London, England, GB

The Role

NewStore is at a pivotal moment. We are opening our platform to AI - letting retailers, partners, and AI agents build on top of what we have created, picking and combining the modules they need. As we make that transition, we are looking for a VP of Engineering to fully own the engineering function: the vision, the organisation, the culture, and the external presence.

This is the most senior engineering role in the company. You will set technical direction, lead the engineering leadership team, represent NewStore in the market, and partner closely with the CEO and COO to shape how the business grows. You will own the how and the what - and you will respect and protect the engineering practices that make our culture what it is.

This is a rare opportunity: a senior engineering leadership role at a company doing something genuinely hard, with a strong platform foundation, a clear strategic direction in agentic commerce, and an engineering culture built around practices that actually produce great software. The right person will have real ownership, real influence, and the chance to build something that matters.

What You'll Do

Technical Vision & Strategy

• Own the engineering vision and technical direction for NewStore - setting the architectural strategy, making the key technology bets, and ensuring the platform is built for where retail is going, not just where it is today
• Drive the evolution of the platform toward a modular, agentic-ready architecture - opening the platform to AI agents, decomposing the stack into clean API surfaces, and building the infrastructure that retailers and partners can build on top of
• Champion AI-native ways of working within engineering itself - agentic coding tools, AI-assisted code review, and automating the repetitive parts of delivery - so the team lives the same AI-first mindset it's building into the product, not just shipping AI features to customers
• Bring a genuine point of view on what agentic commerce means for physical retail, held with conviction but not fixed - and build an engineering organisation that can adapt as fast as the market moves

Engineering Leadership & Organisation

• Lead and develop the full engineering leadership layer - Directors, senior managers, and functional leads across platform & product engineering
• Design the engineering org structure to execute on the product roadmap, scale with the business, and attract and retain the calibre of people NewStore needs
• Own how performance is managed - build, scale and restructure teams as the business needs it, set the standard for how teams are run and how underperformance gets addressed, and act decisively on people and structure, addressing issues while they're still small rather than letting them drift
• Drive hiring, retention, and professional development across the engineering organisation - this is a builder role, not a maintainer role
• Own engineering-level communication to the company - how the org talks about what it is building, what is shipping, and what is coming

External Representation & Presence

• Be the face of NewStore engineering - speaking at industry events, briefing analysts and prospects, and building credibility in the retail technology and commerce infrastructure space
• Partner with Marketing and the CEO to develop a strong engineering brand - thought leadership, technical content, and conference presence that positions NewStore as a serious platform player
• Build and maintain senior, C-level relationships with our customers and partners - someone who can talk technology directly with the people running our clients' businesses

Cross-functional & Operational

• Partner with the CEO and COO on engineering strategy, headcount planning, and quarterly operating rhythm - you are a member of the senior leadership team, not just the head of a function
• Work closely with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to ensure engineering is aligned with commercial priorities and customer commitments
• Partner with the CISO to scale security, compliance and IT infrastructure in step with the business, ensuring secure engineering practices are baked into Engineering principles.

What We're Looking For

Engineering Leadership

• Proven track record as a senior engineering leader - you have owned technical direction at company level, built and scaled engineering organisations across multiple teams and locations, and developed other engineering leaders under you
• Comfortable leading and sustaining a disciplined, practice-driven engineering culture - teaching an organisation what's working and why (or vice versa), leading change and building consistency through constructive discussions at every level (1:1s, town halls, team meetings), and having the conviction to follow through on people and structure decisions, even when they take courage
• Technical enough to reason through architecture problems and tradeoffs directly with the engineering team, without needing translation - you don't need to be hands-on in the code, but you need to understand the implications well enough to bring your own judgment
• Comfortable being the most senior technical voice in the room - in conversations with the board, with customers, with the CEO - and able to hold your own in commercial and strategic leadership discussions
• Comfortable operating in a company of 100-300 people - you know what it takes to move fast without breaking things, and you prefer building to maintaining, ideally with startup or scale-up experience
• A demonstrated ability to spot industry-wide shifts early and act on them - reading where the market is heading before it's obvious, and having the conviction to place bold technical bets ahead of the curve rather than catching up once everyone else already has
• Hands-on experience with AI-driven development - agentic coding tools, AI-assisted review - the ability to sell it within the engineering organization

External Presence

• Proven track record building and sustaining senior, C-level relationships with customers or partners - not just comfort presenting to them
• A public presence - conference talks, technical writing, industry visibility - is a genuine plus, not a requirement on its own; it doesn't by itself mean someone can build and sustain senior, C-level relationships with customers and partners
• Comfortable representing the company externally - with prospects, customers, partners, analysts, and the press
• Ability to translate complex technical strategy into clear, compelling narrative for non-technical audiences including boards, commercial teams, and the market

Technical Depth

• Strong grounding in modern software architecture - multi-tenanted, cloud-native distributed systems, reliable transaction processing patterns for mobile applications, API design, platform decomposition, and event-driven patterns
• A genuine, well-formed point of view on agentic commerce and what AI agents mean for physical retail - you can speak to this with conviction, not just familiarity
• Familiarity with the retail technology or commerce platform space preferred - POS, OMS, inventory management, or adjacent domains
• Experience with AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure at scale

Our Story

NewStore gives the world's leading retail brands a modern platform to run their stores - connecting POS, order management, inventory, fulfilment, clienteling, and payments into a single system that works the way retail actually works. It replaces the tangle of legacy systems most retailers have spent a decade stitching together, with something built for how commerce actually happens now: in-store, online, on a phone, wherever the customer is standing.

Today, over 80 brands across 40+ countries run on NewStore, from heritage names like Clarks to category-defining ones like AllSaints, GANNI and Sweaty Betty. These are brands with real technical requirements, no patience for downtime, and no interest in vendors who don't understand retail. Earning that trust at that scale is the hard part, and it's why the engineering behind this platform has to be genuinely excellent, not just good enough.

And we're not standing still. We're in the middle of one of the most interesting architectural shifts in the company's history: opening the platform to AI agents and modular adoption, so brands can start with the piece they need and build outward from there, rather than a rip-and-replace of everything at once. It's a real bet on where commerce is heading, made early, and the VP joining us now gets to shape what that architecture actually becomes, not inherit someone else's decisions.

Behind the platform is a global team spanning Boston, Berlin, Amsterdam, London and beyond - 30+ nationalities, a genuine diversity of backgrounds, and an engineering culture built on Extreme Programming that most companies talk about and few actually practice day to day. It's a company small enough that one person's technical judgment still shapes the whole platform, and ambitious enough that the work actually matters.

If that sounds like somewhere you'd do your best work, we'd love to hear from you.