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.

- 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