Head of Product & Engineering - Web

Our team of 450 colleagues across Technology, Product and Data is at the heart of The Economist Group’s digital-first agenda. Together, we design, build and optimise the digital products, platforms and data capabilities that power our business and reach millions of people around the world. Whether you're an engineer, product manager, designer, data scientist or analyst, you'll work on products that have real-world impact. From enhancing economist.com and developing new products for Economist Intelligence to creating personalised experiences and applying AI to solve complex challenges, you'll help shape how consumers, businesses and government leaders access trusted insights. Working in cross-functional teams, we combine engineering excellence, product thinking and data expertise to solve meaningful problems, experiment with new technologies and continuously improve the experiences we create. It's an opportunity to do challenging, purposeful work alongside curious, collaborative colleagues, while helping drive sustainable growth for one of the world's most trusted brands.

The role

Web is one of those domains and, commercially, the most exposed. The Head of Product & Engineering role is created to bring together engineering, product, design and quality capability for the web experience - capability currently distributed across separate functions and reporting lines - under a single accountable leader, and to grow it materially through hiring. The purpose is to remove the coordination overhead and hand-offs that currently sit between the people who identify a web opportunity and the people who ship it, and to place clear end-to-end ownership of the web channel with one person.

Responsibilities

• Own the web domain end to end. Set direction, own the roadmap within agreed strategic, financial and capacity guardrails, and be accountable for what the team delivers and how it is built and operated.
• Lead a multidisciplinary team. Line-manage Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Product Designers and senior individual contributors; set expectations, calibrate performance and develop careers across all four disciplines.
• Absorb delivery accountability. Take on the planning, dependency management, prioritisation and delivery assurance previously held by a separate delivery layer, without recreating one.
• Build the team. Consolidate existing web capability and lead an aggressive hiring programme for engineering individual contributors, raising both capacity and the standard of web engineering skill.
• Move the numbers. Own a defined set of KPIs - acquisition volume and mix, registration and subscription conversion, subscriber engagement, retention, web performance - and the financial outcomes attached to them.
• Own technical quality. Set and hold architectural and quality standards for the web stack with Distinguished Engineers and principal QA standards, and keep quality a whole-team accountability rather than a downstream gate.
• Operate with a hands-on posture. Stay close enough to the code, the data and the customer experience to make credible technical trade-offs and to earn the confidence of senior engineers.

Who you are

• Web engineering leadership at scale. Substantial experience running engineering functions for high-traffic, customer-facing web products in a product-led technology organisation. Consumer subscription, media, e-commerce or marketplace context strongly preferred.
• Mobile web engineering depth. A strong engineering background in mobile web — performance, Core Web Vitals, rendering strategy, device and network constraints. This is a key differentiator for selection given the majority-mobile profile of our audience.
• Direct management of engineering teams. A track record built through hands-on management of engineers, not through oversight of an outsourced or matrixed function.
• Management of managers and of other disciplines. Demonstrable experience managing Engineering Managers, and managing Product Managers and Designers at any level of seniority, within a product-based organisation.
• Modern web stack fluency. Deep working understanding of React, Next.js and Node.js, and of the surrounding ecosystem: rendering strategies (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge), TypeScript, CDN and caching, CI/CD, observability, testing, feature flagging and experimentation infrastructure. Able to review architectural decisions on their merits.
• Demonstrated KPI and financial impact. Evidence of moving customer and commercial metrics — conversion, retention, revenue, performance, cost — through engineering teams under direct management. Weighted equally with technical depth.
• Business case construction. Proven ability to build and defend investment cases that combine technical understanding, product acumen and a clear eye for customer experience at scale.
• Team building. A strong record of hiring senior engineering talent in a competitive market and of raising the technical bar of an existing team.

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