Research and Development Director

As the CTO/R&D Director you will be part of the senior leadership reporting directly to the Managing Director and have responsible for how we plan, build, release, and support our software across the business. You will own delivery, day-to-day engineering execution, release quality, team performance, operational discipline architecture and technical direction across our global teams and projects.

This role is a remote and can be based from any European location. Preference for Germany, Poland, Switzerland and UK.

People and Culture

• Transition the development team to a product-based approach to development and delivery, as measured by a reduction in the bespoke effort new tenders require
• The team relies today on a concentrated team of highly experienced subject matter experts. The incoming CTO/R&D Director will widen and deepen that expertise so that individual SMEs are not bottlenecks in delivery
• Overseeing management of engineering leads across all product and platform teams
• Developing the next layer of engineering leadership and identifying capability gaps early
• Driving consistency in working practices across teams and geographies, in a way that respects the deep experience already in place.

Engineering Delivery

• Develop sound processes backed by proper use of tools to ensure measurable improvements in delivering to agreed timescales and budgets
• Accelerate the use of automated approaches to testing, covering both functional and non-functional requirements, so that builds can be rapidly tested across all customers simultaneously, reducing time to release and regression defect rates
• Ensure that processes and training are in place to support secure-by-design and secure-by-default, as required by the EU Cyber Resilience Act
• Be rigorous in the approach to build-versus-buy for supporting software components, and in the cost-benefit analysis of open source versus commercial offerings
• Root cause analysis: systematic investigation of recurring issues across releases, including fault history, installation failures, and release note quality, so that patterns are identified and addressed at source
• Ensure KPIs are automatically tracked and communicated, driving measurable improvements in on-time rate against programme and contract milestones, defect escape rate, and mean time to recovery

Engineering Operations

• Capacity planning across multiple projects in different geographies that anticipates demand and accurately estimates time to complete tasks
• Deployment standards across both cloud and on-premise delivery models, ensuring best practice is applied consistently regardless of infrastructure
• Contractor and third-party development relationships: performance oversight, quality alignment, and a plan to manage dependency over time

AI and Modern Practices

• ebblo is advancing through a structured maturity model for AI-assisted software development, progressing from limited AI support today toward a future state where AI manages the full development cycle, from specification through deployment, under developer guidance. You will lead ebblo's journey toward this level of maturity.
• AI adoption is a strategic priority for the organisation. Working closely with the Product Management team and senior leadership, you will ensure AI adoption translates into measurable gains in speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness, with this being an immediate area of focus. The successful candidate will have proven experience driving an AI-first development lifecycle.

Candidate Experience - Essential:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related discipline
• 15+ years of software engineering and technology leadership experience
• 5+ years in a CTO, VP Engineering, Engineering Director, R&D Director, or similar senior leadership role
• Proven experience leading distributed engineering teams across multiple countries
• Experience scaling software organisations from SME-driven delivery to product-led development
• Strong background in SaaS, enterprise software, cloud platforms, or transportation/mobility software environments
• Experience managing engineering managers and developing leadership succession pipelines

Desired experience:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Technology Management, or MBA
• Experience operating within private equity, acquisitive, or multi-business-unit organisations
• Certifications such as TOGAF, AWS/Azure Architect, SAFe, Scrum, PMP, or ITIL
• Another European Language is a plus.