IT Director - Digital Customer Experience and Engineering

We're looking for IT Director - a leader who is as comfortable in a business steering meeting as in an architecture review. You will lead DXE in Gdańsk and Hamburg and be accountable for both sides of the digital channel: what we build for customers and how well we build it.

Digital Customer Experience & Engineering (DXE) is part of Hapag-Lloyd’s Commercial IT organisation. We build and run the company’s digital customer channel: the Online Business Suite (quotation, booking, documentation and eBL, tracking, invoicing and others), the hapag-lloyd.com website and the mobile apps. For more than 300000 customers worldwide, this is the main way they do business with Hapag-Lloyd.

DXE has about 100 people in Gdańsk and Hamburg and works closely with colleagues in India. That includes 9+ cross-functional product teams, each led jointly by a product manager and a team leader so that business and engineering decisions are made together, an in-house UX team (product design, research, design system) and platform and developer-experience specialists. We own around 40 products, build on Scala, Vue and AWS, and use AI in daily work across the whole delivery process.

Product and business

• Set DXE’s strategy and roadmap together with business product-line owners and Commercial IT leadership
• Run the product portfolio: priorities, investment decisions and value tracking
• Turn commercial goals (more digital bookings, fewer service cases, higher NPS) into product KPIs and OKRs
• Represent the digital channel in business forums, and challenge requests with data when needed
  

Engineering and delivery

• Own the DXE technology stack and architecture, working with Enterprise Architecture and the FIS3 core-system teams
• Shorten time-to-market and improve predictability, measured with DORA and product KPIs
• Keep high standards for security and reliability across around 40 products
• Scale AI-native work from assisted coding to AI across the whole lifecycle, from discovery to monitoring

People

• Lead about 100 engineers, designers and product people through a team of leaders across sites
• Develop leaders who combine business understanding with engineering depth

You’ll be reporting to Senior IT Director – Head of Tech Center in Gdańsk and Managing Director – Commercial IT in Hamburg.

• 12+ years in software product development including:
  • 8+ years of leading others,
  • 5+ years leading leaders (managers of employees) in an organisation of 30-100 people
• A strong engineering foundation: you have engineering experience, can challenge architectural decisions, act as a credible discussion partner for engineers and technical stakeholders, and have a solid understanding of different systems and architectures.
• Hands-on experience leading AI adoption across an engineering organisation, with an understanding that the gains come from changing the process, not only from rolling out tools
• A track record of running a product operating model: empowered cross-functional teams, product managers who own outcomes, and portfolio decisions made with the business
• Experience with customer-facing digital products at scale, ideally B2B platforms, e-commerce or self-service portals, with results you can show in business metrics
• Management by data: OKRs, DORA metrics, NPS and value tracking used to make decisions, not only to report
• Experience influencing senior stakeholders in a matrix organisation that spans several sites and cultures
• Fluent English
• Nice to have: experience in logistics, shipping, banking or another transaction-heavy B2B domain