Head of Engineering

A bit about us:

Established in 1994, The Fragrance Shop is the UK’s leading independent fragrance retailer. Our aim is to make mainstream and luxury fragrances affordable and accessible to all. We showcase more than 130 fragrance brands in over 220 stores throughout the UK and online at  We are expanding and are looking for a Head of Engineering (Web & Mobile) to join the team and be part of a growing and vibrant brand.

• Enjoy work-life balance with our flexible working scheme - including 15 work from home days a year, duvet days and the choice to flex your working hours.
• Vibrant state-of-the-art office, conveniently located in Trafford Park with great transport links and free onsite parking.
• No need to travel to the gym – we have one here for you! Take advantage of our free onsite gym facilities before/after work or even pop in at lunchtime.
• Generous staff discounts on a wide range of fabulous fragrances.
• Excellent progression and development opportunities - work with teams who are passionate about what they do and develop your expertise within a creative and collaborative space.

An exciting opportunity to play a pivotal role delivering best-in-class web and mobile customer experiences within an organisation that has adopted multi-channel at the heart of its retail business strategy.

Working for a fast-growing dynamic retailer which is constantly exploiting new opportunities that require enthusiastic, passionate and capable people to support them in this growth.

Get in on the ground floor and take full control of the development of our e-commerce digital platforms, own the product development roadmap, build and lead an engineering team, and deliver a high-performing international e-commerce experience for our customers across web and mobile.

Our current stack includes Next.js (web) hosted on Azure and a React Native mobile app. This role requires a hands‑on technical leader and architect who can set direction and still ship.

• At least 8 years software development experience with the last 3+ years in a Head of Development / Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer / Technical Architect role leading teams and setting technical direction.
• Strong track record designing and developing mission‑critical, customer‑facing applications in production.
• Full SDLC ownership: delivery, quality, reliability, security, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Agile delivery experience (Scrum/Kanban) with quality‑led practices and a pragmatic testing strategy.

• E-commerce / online retail (or similarly high‑traffic transactional platforms).
• Web applications and modern frontend architecture.
• Mobile application development (React Native).
• API-driven systems and integration patterns (REST/Graph
  
  QL; event-driven awareness is a plus).
• Performance, SEO, conversion optimisation, and experimentation mindset.

• Web: deep hands‑on expertise with Next.js (React) including SSR/SSG/ISR, routing, rendering strategies, caching, and SEO implications.
• Mobile: strong experience with React Native architecture, navigation, performance optimisation, release management (App Store/Play Store), and stability.
• Strong Type Script/JavaScript engineering capability and modern frontend patterns (component architecture, state management, data‑fetching patterns).
• Experience designing and implementing design systems / UI component libraries; strong accessibility (WCAG mindset), i18n, and responsive design.

• CI/CD pipelines for web and mobile; strong understanding of build/release processes and environment management.
• Strong PR/review standards with source control and issue tracking (Git Hub/Azure Dev Ops/Jira or similar).
• Testing strategy across unit/integration/e2e (e.g., Jest, Playwright/Cypress, React Native testing) and quality gates.

• Proven experience running production workloads on Azure (preferred), including deployment pipelines, environments, monitoring, and operational readiness.
• Knowledge of performance monitoring and error tracking (application monitoring,…