Director, Product Software Engineering

Description

Tax and accounting firms across Scandinavia use the company's software daily to manage their work, serve clients and keep up with frequent changes in regulation. The portfolio is being modernised: trusted products are being evolved, new cloud platforms are being built, ways of working are being reshaped, and AI is being adopted across product development to help engineers do more.

This role leads the Scandinavian product software engineering organisation through that change. You will lead a team of experienced managers, architects and engineers, build on a solid base, and push delivery, engineering practice and the organisation forward as part of the company's global engineering community.

You will be accountable for the performance, results and health of product software engineering in Scandinavia. You report to the VP, Region North, lead the engineering management team, and work closely with product management, architecture, security and global engineering.

What makes the role appealing: you can influence how software is built at a time when GenAI is changing the field; the products are relied on for compliance and accuracy; the team is capable, committed and friendly with strong domain knowledge; you lead a local organisation while representing it in global and regional forums; and you join a long-established market leader whose team is actively transforming.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of the strategic roadmap. Keep a single view of demand against capacity, make trade-offs clear before work starts, and confirm that commitments can be met.
• Turn business strategy into technology priorities. Balance spend across new products, modernisation, technical debt, compliance and operational resilience over several years, and question initiatives whose value does not justify their cost.
• Use delivery and quality data to help teams keep improving. Back developer experience work and modern, automated build, test, release and deployment practices.
• Drive AI engineering change. Promote AI-assisted and spec-driven development within the organisation, within security, privacy and governance requirements. Encourage experiments and keep finding ways to simplify and speed up how teams work together.
• Protect quality, security and compliance. Keep quality, security and release readiness standards in place. Be the primary owner of ISO 27001 in your area and prepare the organisation for coming regulation, especially from the EU.
• Work with the Release Manager to introduce modern release planning, coordinating dependencies across products and global teams early so customer updates go smoothly.
• Represent Scandinavian engineering in global and regional forums, work within shared corporate standards and frameworks, and raise conflicts between global and local priorities constructively.
• Lead the Scandinavia and Finsit management team with clear expectations, accountability, engagement and well-being. Build a diverse talent pipeline, support people's development and help engineering leaders grow in their roles.
• Set out which decisions belong to Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security or regional and global leadership. Act as the final escalation point for major incidents and report status, risks and dependencies to regional and global leadership.
• Build your network inside the company and the wider industry, and represent the organisation externally through talks, articles, podcasts and conferences in Sweden.
• First year goals: the organisation stays engaged and resilient through change, engineering leaders grow in their roles, and a strong leadership pipeline is in place. Spec-driven development and agent loops are the norm, testing is fully automated and carried out by agents, and teams have adopted the new way of working. Roadmap visibility and predictability are very high, and product go-to-market lead time has fallen substantially. Technical debt is being tackled strategically with AI for large-scale improvements. DORA metrics show a defect escape rate close to zero, product NPS has risen, and Scandinavia is seen across the company as a leading example of modern, AI-enabled engineering.

Requirements

• An engineering background: you have built software yourself and understand modern architecture and cloud platforms well enough to challenge and guide engineers and earn their trust, even if you no longer code daily.
• Senior leadership of a large software engineering organisation of about 50 people, including leading managers.
• Responsibility for a portfolio of software products sold to external customers who rely on regular, reliable releases.
• A strong grasp of architecture principles, software quality attributes and the trade-offs between them.
• Hands-on use of AI in software development every day, and a clear view of how AI-assisted and spec-driven development is changing.
• Experience with security and compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, including audits.
• A record of working in a matrix organisation and influencing stakeholders you do not manage.
• Fluent Swedish and English.
• Experience with a B2B product software or SaaS company.
• Experience in compliance-driven fields such as tax, accounting, finance or e-invoicing.
• Experience modernising a product portfolio while still serving existing customers.
• Budget ownership and management of vendors and contractors.
• Experience leading engineering teams spread across countries.
• A visible profile in the tech community.
• You lead with clarity and pace in a collaborative, inclusive way that suits Scandinavian culture, and you bring people along rather than direct them.
• You are pragmatic: you simplify, remove friction and bring fresh ideas with energy and optimism.
• You champion change and build enthusiasm for new ways of working.
• You take ownership of results and of your people's growth, and you raise problems openly and constructively.

Conditions

Hybrid working with 8 office days per month.

Travel is occasional, under 10%.

You may be required to attend an onsite interview at a company office.

Candidates must take part in interviews without AI tools or outside prompts, and virtual backgrounds must be removed; breaking this rule can lead to disqualification.