Head of Engineering

Lead delivery, engineering excellence and data-enabled innovation

The mission

Our mission is to delight our 13.7 million customers by offering the right products, at the right price, at the right time. The technical heart of that mission is our Assortment & Pricing domain: a collection of services that span 24/7 operations, real-time pricing decisions, real-time serving of both offers as well as product information (content), massive catalogs and rich partner ecosystems. As Head of Engineering, you will lead the engineering organisation behind this domain: approximately 60 engineers and data scientists, powering eight product teams. You ensure that engineering delivers fast, reliably, and with craftsmanship. You scale for the future – with data and AI at the core.

Your key challenge

• Drive and deliver the future of our offers and content by creating an effortless experience, ensuring high quality, broadening our assortment, and enabling personalization.
• Build a robust foundation for data products and AI/ML applications: enabling self-service, tailored offers and content, and continuous optimization.
• Architect for scale and modularity by defining clear bounded contexts, implementing boundary APIs through Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles, establishing well-defined capabilities, and driving Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
• Build engineering excellence through great software delivery, driven by DORA insights, world-class reliability and observability, fast incident response, AI-assisted and automated development and testing, improved developer experience, and disciplined technical debt management.
• Lead empowered teams that are operating at speed without sacrificing stability. Strike the right balance between freedom and guardrails. At our scale, pricing algorithms iterate millions of decisions daily, and our assortment systems span nearly every conceivable product. Your job is to make sure we deliver rapidly, safely, and sustainably.

What you’ll do

You will co-lead the Assortment & Pricing domain alongside the Head of Product. Together you define how technology delivers business outcomes. While product defines what we build, you lead how we build it—ensuring technical execution, delivery excellence and engineering culture.

• Directly manage 4 Engineering Managers and approximately 60 engineers; partner with Staff Engineers to define and roll out area-wide patterns and standards.
• Set and communicate the technical vision for Assortment & Pricing: aligned with our AI/data strategy, grounded in modern architecture, geared for high throughput and low latency.
• Own engineering standards and practices: code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, resilience, modularity, data-product oriented design.
• Cultivate a culture of empowerment, accountability and high performance: attract, develop and retain exceptional engineering and data science talent; challenge, coach, and cheer Engineering Managers into strong leaders.
• Make high-level decisions on platform investments, architecture prioritisation, technical debt, standardisation vs divergence across teams.
• Participate in cross-domain architectural discussions, drive adoption of engineering excellence practices, and represent your area at the senior leadership level.

Why you can make a difference

You bring a unique blend of technical credibility and senior engineering leadership. Having progressed from software engineer → engineering manager → senior technical leader, you speak the language of engineers, architects and business stakeholders alike. You know how to hold the line on engineering standards (security, observability, architecture) while enabling teams to experiment and innovate. You have experience developing Engineering Managers into strong leaders, growing high-performing teams, and building engineering organisations that deliver at scale. You thrive in complexity and ambiguity: you can discuss distributed systems, MLOps pipelines, data product architecture, and then translate the implications into clear business language.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

• - You’re a “hero leader”: you prefer writing critical code yourself rather than multiplying your impact through teams.
• - You’re a “command & control” leader: you struggle when authority and reporting lines aren’t rigidly defined.
• - You’re a “local optimiser”: you’re comfortable optimising within a well-defined technical map, but you’re less interested in driving both organisational and technological change.
• + You elevate engineering organisations from good to great: your teams ship faster, take deeper ownership, and improve iteratively during your technical leadership.
• + You’re a “champion of empowered teams”: you build high-trust environments where teams choose their approach within well-designed guardrails, and you set the right metrics and frameworks.
• + You’re a “bridge builder”: you connect engineering and product leadership, translate technical feasibility into commercial strategy and build trusted partnerships across functions.

Where you’ll work

You’ll join one of Netherlands’ and Belgium’s best-known online retail tech platforms: 13.7 million customers, 47,000 partners, 2,900 colleagues. The Assortment & Pricing domain sits at the commercial heart of our platform: every pricing decision, every assortment choice, every competitive move flows through systems your teams build. Our engineering culture values autonomy, ownership and continuous improvement. We trust our teams to own their services end-to-end, operate near-flawlessly 24/7, and continuously raise the bar. Ready to create flow and deliver positive impact in this fantastic domain?

Perks of having a blue heart

At bol we understand like no other that you have to take care of yourself first, then your environment and then bol. In that order. Therefore, everyone at bol receives 29 days of vacation.

Our colleagues work hard to make the daily lives of our customers easier and more fun. But of course, we do this in an inspiring and creative environment!

We bring the best of both worlds together by working 50% at the office and 50% at home. This way, we find a balance between organisational and individual needs.