Associate Director, Engineering (Education)

Associate Director, Engineering (Education)

Competitive + Bonus

Remote, UK

Permanent full time

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.