Head of Engineering

Job Description

JOB TITLE: Head of Engineering - Consumer Servicing & Engagement Platform

SALARY: £140,216 - £164,960

LOCATION(S): London

HOURS: [Full-time]

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week currently, or 40% of our time, at our London Office.

About this opportunity

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 across the platform with your peers 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 that supports our Modern Engineering Platform model

  • Support shaping of the roadmap and prioritising outcomes which are critical to keep the solution / product in good health.

  • Create Frameworks and Accelerators that optimise and drive value across the organisation

  • 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.

  • Define and integrate Service Lead capabilities throughout the Platform to enhance service using dashboards and metrics

  • Create a best-in-class central DevOps capability, delivering best practice and tooling across the labs in the platform

  • Establish a Cloud centre of excellence to promote best practices and maturity across the Platform.

  • Establish a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) capability within the Platform

  • Provide comprehensive oversight for mercury controls, currency management as well as mitigation of software vulnerabilities. Additionally, ensure through risk management to maintain the platforms integrity and security

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'll:

  • 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'll:

  • 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.

Our focus is to ensure we are inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity, or culture. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. And it is why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We are disability confident. So, if you would like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

* A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

* An annual performance-related bonus

* Share schemes including free shares.

* Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.

* 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top

* A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow, and thrive? Apply today and find out more.

Join our journey.