Head of Engineering

System Crew Group

United Kingdom, Florida, North Carolina or South Carolina. Full-time, remote with regular travel.

System Crew is a managed IT services group operating from eight countries across North, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Europe: the United States, Costa Rica, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and Poland. Its own engineers work alongside a network of specialist contractors, associates and delivery partners, and the group holds partner status with around 40 technology vendors.

System Crew designs, builds and runs IT infrastructure for organisations with demanding requirements and supports client operations in more than 70 locations worldwide. Clients include international organisations, government bodies, global logistics and supply chain companies and regulated financial services firms, with work delivered across the Americas and Europe. Recent work includes complete IT separations of business units from their former parent companies, new-site build-outs and long‑term managed service contracts.

The group is certified to ISO 9001 and ISO/IEC 27001.

The Group Head of Engineering leads the group’s engineering function: in-house engineers and specialist contractors who deliver projects, run client environments and staff the service desk, spread across seven hours of time difference from Central Europe to Central America. The role carries full responsibility for how engineering work is planned, delegated, delivered and documented, and for raising the technical standard of the team.

The group is growing, and the role is expected to build an engineering organisation that scales with it: one that delivers on time, runs on clear ownership, and uses AI and automation as a normal part of daily work. The role reports to the Group Managing Director and works closely with sales and pre‑sales on solution design and bids. The role suits someone who genuinely enjoys infrastructure engineering, keeps up with technology out of interest, is still comfortable opening a console to understand a problem, and takes pride in environments that run quietly and well.

Leadership and management

• Lead, organise and develop the engineering team across all locations, with clear ownership, delegation and accountability for every project and client environment.
• Plan resourcing and workload so that projects and client commitments are delivered on time, and report progress, risks and slippage early and honestly.
• Run a working rhythm suited to a distributed team: clean handovers across time zones, written documentation as the default, regular one‑to‑ones and team reviews.
• Hire, onboard and develop engineers in several countries, manage performance, and build a layer of team leads who can run work without constant escalation.
• Travel to team locations and client sites as needed, including the United States, Costa Rica, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland.

Engineering and service delivery

• Set and enforce engineering standards: reference architectures, build standards, change and release management, patching, backup and recovery testing, and security baselines.
• Act as the senior technical authority and final escalation point for complex incidents and designs.
• Lead the technical delivery of transformation projects, including IT separations (carve‑outs), data centre and cloud migrations, and new‑site build‑outs.
• Own service quality against SLAs for the service desk and managed services.
• Own the engineering side of the group’s management systems and their audits, currently ISO 9001 and ISO/IEC 27001.

AI and automation

• Use AI assistants and agents daily for scripting,…