GCC, Site & Engineering Leadership
Head of Function
Owning a discipline rather than a team — platform, security, data, quality. A different shape of authority, and usually less of it than the title implies.
Head-of roles own a capability across an organisation rather than a reporting line through it. That makes them unusually dependent on influence, and unusually variable in how much real authority comes attached — which is why the most important work happens before you accept.
The question to settle at offer stage
- Do people report to you, or do you set standards others implement? Both are real jobs; only one is what most candidates assume they are taking.
- Do you own budget? A function without budget is an advisory role.
- Can you say no, and does it stick? Ask for a recent example where the function blocked something, and what happened next.
- Who writes your objectives? If it is unclear at interview, it will be contested in the job.
| Time | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|
| 09:00 | A standard nobody asked for. You are writing the thing that will be applied across twelve teams, which means it has to be short enough to read and specific enough to follow. |
| 11:00 | A team wants an exception. The judgement is whether granting it is pragmatism or the beginning of the standard not existing. |
| 13:00 | Reporting upward. Your function is a cost centre until you can show it in outcomes, so you spend real time on the numbers that make that case. |
| 15:00 | Hiring. Head-of roles live or die on the two or three senior people you bring in. |
| 16:30 | Influence work. A one-to-one with an engineering director who does not report to you and whose adoption decides whether any of this happens. |
The decisive round
“How would you raise the standard across teams you do not control?”
Interviewer: “You own the discipline but the engineers report elsewhere. How do you actually change anything?”
A weak answer. “I'd build relationships with engineering leadership, establish standards collaboratively, and use metrics to drive accountability.” The words everyone uses. No mechanism, and ‘drive accountability’ without authority is exactly the thing being asked about.
A strong answer. “I would assume I cannot compel anything, and design for that from the start.
The mechanism that actually works is making the good path the easy path. If the standard requires teams to do extra work, adoption will track how much they like me, which is not a strategy. If the standard arrives as a template, a library or a pipeline stage that removes work they were already doing, adoption is close to automatic. So my first investment is always in the paved road rather than the policy.
Second, make the current state visible without punishing it. A scorecard per team, published, showing where they are against the standard. Visibility alone moves a surprising amount, provided it is framed as information rather than as a leaderboard — the moment it becomes a ranking, teams optimise the metric instead of the outcome.
Third, pick two teams who want to be first and make them visibly successful. Peer evidence beats mandate, and the second adopter is always cheaper than the first.
Fourth, reserve hard gates for genuinely non-negotiable things and be sparing. A gate spends political capital every time it fires, so I would have one or two, not fifteen.
And I would agree upfront with engineering leadership what happens when a team simply refuses, because discovering that there is no answer during the first refusal is how these functions become decorative.”
Whether you know that influence-without-authority is a design problem rather than a relationship problem, and whether you are sparing with gates.
Compensation
| Market | Band | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| United States | $200k – $320k base | Wide, and tracks whether the role owns headcount |
| India | ₹70L – ₹1.5Cr total | Common in GCCs, where the function is often global from India |
What this role tests
Themes, and where to learn them
These chapters are shared across every role that tests them, so preparation here compounds rather than being spent once.
Practice questions across all themes → · Back to GCC, Site & Engineering Leadership →