On - Head of Engineering – Commercial Platform - London

Team for Career Site

Technology

In short

At On, the most exciting and fastest-growing global sports brand, we are looking for a Head of Engineering – Commercial Platform to lead the teams responsible for the core commercial foundation that powers On across every channel: Retail, DTC, Wholesale, and future growth vectors.

This role owns the platforms that make experiences possible at scale — POS & Retail Experience Platform, Customer Profile Platform, Customer Communication Platform, Merchandising & Pricing Platform, Commercial Product API Platform, and Growth & Expansion Platform. Your mission is to build a cohesive, reliable, and reusable platform foundation so any channel team can build on top without extra effort, accelerating On’s commercial expansion for the coming years.
You will manage multiple teams (ICs + Engineering Managers), drive platform strategy and technical excellence, and partner closely with Product, Data, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and Experience Engineering leaders to ensure the platform is scalable, composable, resilient, and easy to consume.

Your entrepreneurial and results-driven mindset, paired with strong platform engineering depth and proven global-scale execution, will make you a key member of the leadership team shaping On’s future commercial capabilities.

Your mission

Lead Platform Vision — and Deliver Leverage

– Lead and grow multiple engineering teams responsible for On’s commercial platform foundation
– Shape platform strategy, operating model, and multi-year roadmap in partnership with Product and senior leadership
– Define what “platform success” means: adoption, reliability, time-to-integrate, reuse, and developer/consumer experience
– Stay deeply hands-on: drive architectural reviews, challenge design decisions, and ensure strong technical governance
– Ensure alignment with On Tech’s architecture north star and long-range platform strategy

Build a Commercial Foundation that Scales Globally

– Own the technical excellence of platform services that operate across regions, channels, and market constraints
– Build composable platform capabilities (APIs, events, domain services, shared data contracts) that minimize duplication and unlock velocity.
– Build predictable execution: de-risk delivery, manage dependencies, and reduce lead time for platform consumers

Drive platform maturity across:

Reliability & Resilience (SLOs/SLIs, incident management, disaster recovery, offline-first patterns where needed)

Security & Privacy (identity, authorization, consent, data retention, regulatory requirements)

Scalability & Performance (traffic spikes, seasonal peaks, product drops, store operations)

Observability & Operability (monitoring, tracing, on-call excellence, runbooks)

Enable Experience Teams with a World-Class Developer Platform Mindset

– Treat internal experience teams (DTC, retail, growth, wholesale) as customers — optimize for ease of use, documentation, and self-service
– Establish high-quality platform interfaces: API standards, event contracts, SDKs, versioning, backward compatibility, and migration playbooks
– Build strong cross-team collaboration patterns to unblock experience teams and drive shared outcomes
– Balance autonomy and alignment: empower teams while ensuring consistency, governance, and simplicity

Operate with “High Heat” Excellence
On is a high-growth brand: launches, drops, peak demand, store openings, and market expansion create real operational pressure

– Build systems and teams that thrive in high-stakes environments by:
1. enforcing SLO ownership and operational readiness
2. raising incident response standards and postmortem quality
3. ensuring robust rollout strategies, feature flags, and fallback mechanisms
– Make “boring reliability” a platform feature

Shape Culture, Talent, and the Leadership Bench

– Foster a culture rooted in curiosity, craftsmanship, feedback, and accountability
– Coach Engineering Managers and senior engineers; build a strong leadership pipeline
– Own hiring, performance, and org design — always raising the bar and improving how we recruit and onboard
– Model On’s values and tech principles through visible leadership and clear standards

Connect Platform Work to Business Impact

– Translate commercial strategy into platform bets and measurable outcomes
– Build a platform that reduces time-to-market for: new stores and store formats, new regions and regulatory requirements, new partners and channels & new growth experiments
– Make trade-offs with clarity: time-to-deliver vs. long-term leverage, local optimization vs. global standardization, build vs. buy.

Your story

– Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams (ICs + EMs), ideally in platform-heavy, product-driven organizations
– Deep platform engineering expertise with a track record of building and scaling global, distributed, mission-critical platforms
– Strong architectural leadership across domains such as:
1. identity and access (IDP, authN/authZ, consent)
2. customer profile and customer-360 patterns
3. communication orchestration (email/SMS/push), preference management
merchandising and pricing systems (rules, experimentation, governance, auditability)
4. API platforms (standards, versioning, gateways, developer experience)
5. retail/POS platforms (offline resilience, device constraints, fiscalization readiness is a plus)

– Strong product and stakeholder mindset: you can simplify complexity, align diverse groups, and drive decisions in sophisticated environments
– A track record of predictable delivery with high quality — you can navigate ambiguity, dependencies, and cross-functional constraints.
– Fluent communicator: you tell compelling technical stories and create clarity for all levels (ICs to execs)
– Strong people leadership: you coach leaders, build healthy teams, and cultivate high performance
– A startup mindset: resourceful, iterative, bias-to-action, and comfortable building foundations while the company scales rapidly
– Collaborative, humble, and energized by On’s mission to ignite human spirit through movement

Meet the team

As you might expect from a running brand, the wider E-Commerce team at On is a fast-paced place to be. You will work in the diverse Berlin-based Customer platform team as part of Commercial Technology. You will collaborate with roles including Software Engineers, QA Engineers, Product Managers, Data Analytics, Marketing and others of stream-aligned or platform teams that are located in Berlin, Zurich and London.