Value Stream Engineering Lead

Description

You will join the CTO Engineering team as Value Stream Engineering Lead and report to the Head of Engineering.

You will own the engineering side of a Value Stream, keeping teams pointed at business and customer goals while they deliver reliable, high quality technology. You will help teams move work through faster, clear blockers, and keep improving how engineering is done across the stream.

The role is technical leadership, so staying close to the code matters. You will lead a mix of permanent and partner engineers and step in hands on when needed: shaping solutions, reviewing architecture and code, helping with production issues and coaching teams through hard problems. You will push for technical standards and make sure solutions can scale, are easy to maintain, are secure and make commercial sense.

You will help shape and embed the company's data governance operating model across a large, complex organisation. This is a Group wide capability with strong executive sponsorship, and you can influence how data is governed from an early stage. Trusted, high quality data supports better decisions, customer outcomes and the company's growing Data and AI plans.

The company has a 4.5-star Glassdoor rating and has been named a Sunday Times Best Places to Work for the last 2 years. It has been operating for over 100 years.

Responsibilities

• Set clear technical direction for the engineering teams across the Value Stream and keep priorities and delivery tied to business and customer results.
• Give hands on technical help across solution design, architecture, code problems and production debugging, especially where delivery is complex.
• Promote modern engineering habits: code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, performance, security and resilient design.
• Lead continuous improvement across the engineering lifecycle, using Agile, DevOps, automation and value stream thinking to raise quality, efficiency, flow and delivery speed.
• Build, coach and grow strong engineering teams made of permanent and partner staff, fostering technical excellence, teamwork, ownership and ongoing learning.
• Work closely with Product, Architecture and other technology leaders to keep solutions scalable and sustainable, and to find and clear technical dependencies, risks and blockers across the Value Stream.
• Help embed the data governance operating model across the organisation.

Requirements

• Extensive software engineering experience across design, development, testing and deployment, with proven experience leading teams in complex digital environments.
• Strong hands on skills across the software development lifecycle, including Java and Spring Boot, plus modern frontend tools such as Angular and React.
• Experience designing, building and running scalable microservices platforms, with a solid grasp of event driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, distributed systems and API integration.
• Strong knowledge of modern engineering and DevOps practice: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code, performance tuning and secure, resilient design.
• Cloud native engineering experience on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, with enough depth to review designs, examine code, troubleshoot production and contribute to solutions directly when needed.
• Proven leadership of cross functional teams that mix permanent and partner staff. You can coach engineers, influence senior stakeholders and explain complex technical topics in business terms.
• Experience using value stream mapping or analysis to find bottlenecks and improve engineering flow and delivery.
• Experience working across complex digital platforms, including backend services, frontend apps, mobile experiences, integrations and cloud infrastructure.
• Relevant professional or technical qualifications.

Conditions

Permanent, full time.

Hybrid working, listed as LI-HH and LI-Hybrid.

The company welcomes diverse perspectives and wants everyone to feel valued and able to do their best work.

Benefits

• 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays, with the option to buy extra holiday.
• Employer pension contribution of up to 7%.
• Annual bonus, cash car allowance and private medical insurance.
• Free AA breakdown membership from Day One, with 50% off for family and friends.
• Discounts on AA products, including car and home insurance.
• 24/7 GP access and wellbeing support for you and your family.
• A wide range of employee discounts, including a car salary sacrifice scheme.