Head of Engineering

This is a time of growth for the platform. We're passionate about building a Diverse, collaborative, empowered and skilled team of engineers. We're on the journey to simplify and modernise our tech stack and innovate using new technologies. We're keen to move towards our target state with a cloud first (private and public) approach in our hosting strategy and to transform our systems from monolith to microservices whilst decommissioning our legacy estate.

Collaboration is critical to the success of this role. As Head of Engineering, you'll work collaboratively with Head of Product alongside other engineering leads within the platform. You’ll work hand-in-hand leading the teams with the Product Owner to:

• Jointly assume the ownership, development, and accountability of strategic and quarterly objectives & key results, and are incentivised against a balanced set of business and technology outcomes.
• Optimise, evolve, and deliver an efficient operating model.
• Support shaping of the roadmap and prioritising outcomes which are critical to keep the solution / product in good health.
• Create an organisation that is truly data driven and providing the best value propositions to our customers.
• Define the What and How the team deliver, through a combination of engineering solutions and changes to our ways of working i.e. agile and instrumentation.

About us...

Like the modern Britain we serve, we’re evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We’re growing with purpose. Join us on our journey and you will too.

What you’ll get involved in…

As our Head of Engineering, you'll lead the technical direction and develop tech strategy in collaboration with business and enterprise architects. You'll drive the core technology agenda within the platform. You'll be responsible for the technical roadmap, management of technical debt and other technical demands. You'll be accountable for the engineering teams that will design, build, integrate, deploy, and run the system. Particularly software, that supports the business and operations, with a focus on resilience, low latency, reusability, accessibility by third parties as well as scalability.

What you can bring to the role:

The role will be suited to someone who combines leadership skills with strong technical experience and comes from a hands on an engineering background.

As a leader, you:

• Drive large teams (100+) strategically and help them to push the boundaries to spearhead into future barring the limitations.
• Enable a culture based on the fundamentals of psychological safety instilling confidence, authenticity and trust throughout your teams.
• Driving an Agile mindset, bringing in strong experience on the use of Agile ways of working and tooling.
• Create a culture of learning and continuous improvement through a “Fail Fast, Learn Faster” mentality within teams to experiment and test new ways of engineering, to act as a change agent for engineering and team culture, and to cultivate a systems-thinking and user-experience led design approach.
• Have a strong passion for and technical understanding of end to end systems including customer facing interfaces and backend and can provide support, knowledge and mentoring to the teams.
• Lead designing operating models, develop hiring strategy and help teams to scale support business growth utilising lean and agile principles
• Encourage teams to use the best engineering practices, tooling, and methods and contribute towards inner-source activities and attend MeetUps.
• Leading & successfully delivering large scale change (£15M+)

As an Engineer, you:

• Understand Web, Microservices, Cloud eco-systems.
• Understand Systems Thinking and Service Design to mitigate reactive solutions that leads to further technical debt.
• Understand the benefits of BDD & TDD and ensure engineers write upfront tests against team defined agile definitions and delivery stories.
• Automation of everything will be a priority.
• Have proven understanding of the entire software development lifecycle and experience in Agile delivery of products along with knowledge of modern software development toolsets including DevOps, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery.