Head of Engineering

Job Title: Head of Engineering

Contract Type: Permanent

Location: Edinburgh or Alderley Edge

Grade: D

Working style: Hybrid 50% home/office based

Closing date: Monday 20th January

We have a unique opportunity for an experienced Head of Engineering to join Royal London and lead the strategic development and innovation of the entire engineering practice into the next stage of our transformation. This role will involve shaping the engineering strategy, influencing key business decisions, and aligning our engineering initiatives with Royal London Group’s overall goals.

Within this position you will ensure that new opportunities and threats are considered in the strategy. This role involves establishing core standards, frameworks, tooling and guiding principles for the value streams/platforms, leading the engineering function, and fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement, which includes team and individual empowerment.

Some key responsibilities include accountability for strategic direction, governance, development and career pathways, sourcing and managing talent, and cultivating a positive culture and working environment.

The Head of Engineering collaborates with various teams, including value stream and shared platform leads, to integrate engineering strategies with Royal London Group’s overall objectives.

About the role

• Deliver engineering excellence, developing strong technical leadership that inspires a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration and innovation across a diverse engineering community.
• Set the strategy, principles, and roadmap for best-in-class engineering practices, covering development practices across multiple technology stacks, modern test automation approaches, SDLC and CI/CD practices, and platform engineering. Ensure consistent standards, tooling, and frameworks to enhance quality and delivery speed.
• Design, implement and maintain the appropriate engineering controls and have oversight of all other teams operation.
• Develop effective engineering insights capability based on a set of proven metrics e.g. DORA, Developer Experience.  Work with the teams to review and gain insight to drive continuous improvement.
• Own and maintain Job families / roles mgt / carrer pathways and ensure the required skills and capabilities are in place to support the RL group in the short, medium and long term.
• Design, implement and maintain cross engineering frameworks/enablers.  For example, DevEx portal and provision of central tools e.g. ADO, GitHub, GitHub CoPilot, Jira, Visual Studio, Maven (Java Automation), Delphix, Cucumber, LoadRunner etc.
• Keeping an awareness of external trends/developments/horizon scanning to ensure RL are ready to react/pivot/adapt when required.  Implement new wow/frameworks if required to generate value from new technologies as required.
• Design and implement an environment and data management strategy that can be implemented consistently across all engineering teams.
• Contribute to the formulation and review of the Group Information Technology Strategy and operational business objectives to ensure delivery teams have a clear vision of purpose ensuring continuous improvement goals are maximised.

About you

• A highly skilled DevOps Practitioner with solid experience in cloud architectures & migrations.
• Extensive experience of working within the multiple delivery methodologies (e.g. agile, scrum, kanban) & tooling.
• Proven technical skills across the following areas:
  • Data & Analytics Platforms
  • API Design & Development
  • AI & Machine Learning Integration
  • Event-Driven Architectures
  • Robotic Process Automation
  • Workflow Automation
  • Process Design & Optimization
  • Cloud Based Platforms (e.g. Azure, AWS)
  • Development Languages (e.g. C#, Java, Python, SQL, HTML)
  • Development and Testing Tools (e.g. Gherkin)
  • Container Orchestration Tools (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Data Visualisation/Reporting Tools (e.g. Power BI, Tableau)
  • CI/CD Tools (e.g. GitHub)

Qualifications/Knowledge

• Proven leadership and teambuilding skills
• Proven people management skills
• Proven commercial awareness
• High level influencing skills
• Excellent communication both written and verbal
• Proven project management skills

About Royal London

We are the UK’s largest mutual life, pensions and investment company, offering protection, long-term savings and asset management products and services.   

Our People Promise to our colleagues is that we will all work somewhere inclusive, responsible, enjoyable and fulfilling. This is underpinned by our Spirit of Royal London values; Empowered, Trustworthy, Collaborate, Achieve. 

We have always been proud to reward employees by offering great workplace benefits such as 28 days annual leave in addition to bank holidays, an up to 14% employer matching pension scheme and private medical insurance. You can see all our benefits here - Our Benefits

Inclusion, diversity and belonging. 

We’re an Inclusive employer. We celebrate and value different backgrounds and cultures across Royal London. Our diverse people and perspectives give us a range of skills which are recognised and respected – whatever their background.