Luke Bradshaw
Head of Engineering / Director of Engineering — SaaS Platforms, Cloud & AI
Hire this person
Send a job offer directly to this candidate
About
Engineering leader with experience building and scaling SaaS engineering organisations, improving delivery, engineering quality and operational excellence while helping teams evolve technology in a pragmatic way. Known for favouring incremental change over big-bang rewrites, building strong engineering cultures and creating the conditions for teams to deliver with confidence. Director of Engineering with experience leading 40–50+ cross-functional engineers through engineering managers and senior technical leaders across multi-product SaaS portfolios up to £30m ARR, working across engineering, architecture, product and organisational design.
Passionate about improving engineering effectiveness through clear ownership, modern engineering practices and continuous improvement.
Experience
Director of Engineering at Access Legal (2025-08 – Present)
Brought in to define and lead the transformation of a legacy desktop Legal CMS into a modern, cloud-native, AI-first SaaS platform.
- Defining target modular architecture and leading incremental decomposition of a tightly coupled monolith
- Establishing shared platform services (identity, document processing, search, AI orchestration, telemetry)
- Defining AI as a platform-level capability across document workflows
- Introducing AI-assisted and agentic engineering practices
- Improving reliability, observability, and deployment quality
- Delivering platform change while maintaining product delivery
- Making trade-offs between architecture and time-to-value
- Supporting and evolving operational workflows used by customer-facing teams
- Designing org structures aligned to platform domains
- Developing engineering managers and senior ICs into stronger technical and organisational leaders
- Establishing clear expectations around ownership, accountability, and engineering quality
Head of Engineering at Access Construction (2025-02 – 2025-08)
Led engineering across multiple products, focusing on integration and platform consistency.
- Defined shared platform strategy for data, identity, and AI
- Migrated legacy systems toward cloud-native services
- Introduced architectural standards and patterns
- Improved interoperability across product estate
Head of Engineering at Access Hospitality (2023-11 – 2025-02)
Inherited a fragmented SaaS estate and led stabilisation and platform evolution.
- Defined domain boundaries and decomposed legacy systems
- Migrated WebForms → React
- Rebuilt mobile apps using React Native
- Introduced shared services (identity, billing, analytics)
- Enabled international expansion
- Improved customer-facing platform responsiveness and stability under increasing demand
- Increased delivery throughput by reducing release friction and improving system ownership
- Built and scaled a multi-team engineering organisation aligned to product and platform domains
- Developed engineering managers and senior engineers, strengthening leadership capability across teams
- Established a culture of ownership, accountability, and proactive engineering practices
Engineering Manager at Access Hospitality (2019-08 – 2023-11)
Led multiple teams while remaining hands-on across platform and product development.
- Introduced modular and event-driven architecture
- Built CI/CD pipelines
- Improved reliability and monitoring
- Mentored engineers into leadership roles
- Delivered multiple SaaS transformations while improving delivery speed and system reliability
QA Engineer → Engineer → Senior Engineer → Technical Lead → Engineering Manager at Access Group, West UC, Coventry Building Society (2010 – 2019)
Progressed from early QA roles into hands-on software engineering and technical leadership, building and evolving customer-facing applications, operational systems, and supporting platform components.
- Designed and built full-stack applications, including backend services (C#/.NET) and frontend user-facing features
- Owned system design across data models, APIs, and application layers
- Built internal tools and platforms to improve engineering productivity and delivery workflows
- Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines and release automation
- Developed integration layers between internal systems and external services
- Built data processing and reporting pipelines
- Implemented monitoring and observability using New Relic and Application Insights
- Led root cause analysis and resolution of complex production issues
- Worked closely with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions
