Job Description
Location: Hybrid working with a requirement for in-person (in Leeds) meet-ups once per week minimum, with more frequent attendance during onboarding and key planning periods.
Our office address is: Consort House, 12 South Parade, Leeds, LS1 5QS
Salary: £65,000 – £70,000 per annum, dependent on experience, plus paid overtime
Hours of Work: Full-time: 40 hrs P/W. Our standard working day is 8 hours, but our flexible working policy provides employees with the flexibility they need to balance their work and personal lives.
Annual Leave: 30 days including bank holidays (flexible up to 35 days with pro-rata salary reduction). An additional annual leave loyalty scheme kicks in after the first full year of employment.
Pension: Employer: 3% Employee: 5% (gross)
Application Deadline: March 10, 2026
Full job spec – we advertise via many different job boards, to ensure you have the full and correct details for this job and information on how to apply, please visit - https://www.vepple.com/hope
Job Summary
This is a senior leadership role at a pivotal stage in Vepple’s evolution. This role is central to Vepple’s next phase of maturity, helping the business move from founder-led delivery to a more scalable, resilient and well-governed product and engineering function. As the company continues to scale, we are seeking an experienced Head of Product & Engineering to provide clear ownership, direction and inspiration across our product and development functions.
Vepple is an enterprise SaaS platform operating in the Higher Education sector, helping universities to recruit students through personalised virtual experiences, guided tours, interactive maps and events. The platform is central to our customers’ recruitment strategies and is described by many as essential (see video in the full job spec).
The Head of Product & Engineering will be responsible for translating company strategy into a clear, executable product and technology vision, ensuring that product delivery, engineering quality and team development move forward in a joined-up, sustainable way.
This role will line manage the Product Manager and some of the development team, providing leadership across both disciplines while maintaining a strong collaborative relationship with the CTO and wider senior team. A major near-term focus of the role will be shaping and delivering the next evolution of the Vepple platform, including foundational decisions around CMS architecture, replatforming and how SEO and LLM/GEO considerations are embedded at the heart of a future v2 of Vepple.
Job Remits
To achieve the upper level of the salary range, you must provide evidence that you have substantial experience across the remits below. If you don’t yet have depth in a particular area, this will be reflected in the salary offered and supported through onboarding and development.
We are looking for someone who can:
Product Strategy and Leadership
* Own and evolve Vepple’s product strategy in line with company objectives and platform priorities
* Translate company vision into a clear, prioritised roadmap that balances short-term delivery with longer-term platform health
* Make clear, timely product decisions where trade-offs exist, owning the downstream impact on delivery, quality and pace
* Actively protect focus by saying no to work that does not align with agreed priorities, even where there is short-term pressure
* Ensure prioritisation is driven by customer value, commercial impact and technical sustainability rather than reactivity or noise
* Work with the Product Manager to establish a structured student insight programme, with the Product Manager leading this over time and insight being used to validate and inform product decisions
Engineering Leadership and Delivery
* Provide leadership and direction across the engineering team, ensuring consistent standards of quality, reliability and maintainability
* Work closely with the Senior Developer to shape well-considered technical and infrastructure proposals that take account of customer impact, commercial context and delivery risk
* Represent the CTO in progressing major technical and platform decisions to a clear, well-framed recommendation stage, enabling efficient approval without requiring day-to-day CTO involvement
* Act as the decision-maker on day-to-day product and platform trade-offs, while escalating and supporting approval of major infrastructure or architectural decisions
* Ensure engineering effort balances new delivery with ongoing platform health, technical debt and risk reduction
People Management and Team Development
* Line manage the Product Manager and development team
* Coach and develop individuals to help them perform at their best
* Foster a culture of ownership, accountability and continuous improvement
* Support recruitment and onboarding as the team grows
Product Operations and Governance
* Further embed and mature Vepple’s product development lifecycle (Idea → MRD → PRD → Roadmap → GTM → Dev → Monitor → Reflect)
* Ensure the lifecycle is consistently applied and lightweight, supporting clarity and pace without unnecessary ceremony
* Reduce technical and operational risk by improving documentation, ownership clarity, testing discipline, automation and observability, ensuring the platform is understandable, maintainable and resilient beyond any single individual
* Take ownership of platform incidents and outages, coordinating internal response across Product and Engineering, managing external communication where appropriate, and escalating to and leaning on the CTO when additional support or decision-making is required
* Cross-functional Collaboration
* Collaborate closely with Customer Success, Sales and Marketing to ensure product decisions reflect customer needs and commercial priorities
* Support customer-facing activity where it adds value, including attending KickStart onboarding sessions alongside the Solutions Engineer, which may involve travel and occasional overnight stays
* Represent Vepple externally through public speaking at community sessions, webinars and, where appropriate, industry conferences
* Communicate product direction and rationale clearly to both internal and external audiences
What Success Looks Like in the First 12–18 Months
By the end of the first year to eighteen months, the successful Head of Product & Engineering will have:
* Established clear direction and confidence around Vepple’s next-generation platform architecture, including decisions on CMS replatforming and how SEO and LLM/GEO considerations are embedded at the core of a future v2 of Vepple
* Created a roadmap that balances foundational platform work with continued delivery of customer-facing value, with clear rationale understood across the business
* Embedded the product development lifecycle (Idea → MRD → PRD → Roadmap → GTM → Dev → Monitor → Reflect) as a lived, lightweight way of working, rather than a theoretical process
* Improved clarity, quality and predictability of delivery, evidenced by fewer late surprises, stronger launch readiness and more consistent post-release learning
* Reduced day-to-day dependency on the CTO for delivery triage and prioritisation decisions, while maintaining confidence in technical quality and product direction
* Ensured student insight and sentiment are a regular, structured input into product decisions, influencing both what is built and how it is positioned
* Made practical, value-adding use of AI within Product and Engineering workflows, improving the quality of documentation, testing, insight generation and overall team leverage
* Ensured the platform is continuously understandable and well-documented, so its architecture, risks and trade-offs can be clearly explained and reasoned about by senior stakeholders without reliance on founder-level context, supported by clear documentation and metrics
Key Skills, Experience and General Outlook
Key Skills
Essential
* Proven experience leading both product and engineering functions, or closely aligned teams
* Strong strategic thinking with the ability to translate vision into execution
* Excellent communication skills, able to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders
* Sound judgement and confidence in decision-making under uncertainty
* A pragmatic approach to process, favouring outcomes over ceremony
Desirable
* Experience in a SaaS or EdTech environment
* Experience working in a scaling or founder-led business
Experience
Essential
* Significant experience in senior product, engineering or technology leadership roles
* Experience in line managing multidisciplinary teams
* Experience owning or contributing to product strategy and delivery at a company level
Desirable
* Experience working with Higher Education customers
* Experience balancing hands-on technical understanding with leadership responsibilities
General Outlook
* Comfortable leading through change, ambiguity and long-term bets such as replatforming
* Curious and analytical, with a strong interest in how AI can be used to improve product discovery, development and quality
* Calm under pressure, particularly during periods of architectural change or platform risk
* Passionate about building products that genuinely deliver customer and student value
* Strong alignment with Vepple’s values and culture
* Curious and analytical, always seeking better ways to solve problems
How will Vepple use the information about you?
We will use your data to process your application, including complying with any legal obligations, to enable us to manage the recruitment process. We will only share your data with relevant parties as part of our recruitment process and we will not share your data for marketing or employment purposes outside of Vepple. For more information on Vepple (Revolution Viewing LTD) job applicant privacy notice, please visit our website.
Please note: the successful candidate must, by the start of their employment, have permission to work in the UK.