Trainline case study – European VP Engineering placed in UK transport & logistics company

About:

Trainline is an international digital rail and coach technology platform, headquartered in the United Kingdom and backed by KKR. It sells train tickets and railcards as well as providing free access to live train times and railway station information through its website and iOS/Android mobile apps.

Requirement:

Trainline was looking for a VP Engineering to overhaul the search and e-commerce platform around timetabling and tickets. The role responsibilities included scaling a team from 30 to 300 across London, Edinburgh, Paris and India. The ideal candidate needed to be a commercial technologist capable of building a highly accountable, functionally segregated engineering division, which would contribute to increasing the valuation of this KKR-backed asset tenfold.

Solution:

Working closely with KKR and Trainline’s management team, we ran a structures process identifying candidates in the UK and across Europe. We focused on identifying candidates from high-growth B2C tech businesses, used to working with high throughput, low latency across a range of sectors, from e-commerce to gaming and data-led products and services. Cultural fit was a key part of the role requirements, so we focused on candidates we were structured and driven, with a strong ability to communicate with various stakeholders, including investors.

Result:

We placed a candidate who was the former Global Head of Engineering at Euromoney. They stayed with Trainline for 4 years, including during the company’s highly successful IPO in 2019. During this time, they built a 450-strong engineering team across central London and Paris, with smaller teams in Portugal, India, Poland, and further afield.

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