Head of Software Engineering & Platform

Salary: Up to £95kpa + Bonus + Benefits
Location: Peterborough 2 Days per week/Remote
Reporting To: Director of Technology & Data

Background to Role

Our client is the Leader in their field and have ambitious plans supported by strong business pipeline to double the revenue of their business by the end of 2028. To enable this, they are embarking on a bold and significant business transformation reviewing and improving operational processes across the Group and modernising their technology stack.

They are transforming their engineering operations to enhance commercial performance through a product-led approach. The new Head of Engineering will play a crucial role in reshaping platform architecture, embedding resilience, and fostering a culture of ownership among product teams.

We are seeking a Hands-on Technical Leader.

Key Responsibilities

End-to-End Ownership: Manage the entire engineering lifecycle, ensuring accountability from development to production.
Architecture Implementation: You will help shape and implement our platform architecture direction, embed DevSecOps practices, and raise engineering standards across our teams.
Production Readiness: Establish criteria for “production-ready” systems, ensuring stability, observability, security, and resilience.
Service Operations Transformation: Evolve the service desk from reactive to proactive, creating a feedback loop that enhances quality and resilience.
Innovation and Stability: Balance rapid experimentation with the need for reliability and governance, ensuring that once a capability is critical, it is engineered for stability.

Expected Impact (12–18 Months)

Code Quality: Improve standards and apply them consistently across teams.
Incident Management: Reduce incident frequency through structural improvements rather than temporary fixes.
Observability: Enhance operational insights to make performance and risk transparent.
Automation: Increase automation in infrastructure and deployment processes, minimizing manual errors.
Resilience Testing: Ensure disaster recovery processes are credible and not just theoretical.

Leadership & Influence

Collaborative Leadership: Influence engineering structure and hiring, working closely with Product, Data, and Infrastructure teams.
Technical Leadership: Provide confident guidance at senior levels, translating technical realities into business impacts.

Cultural Change: Challenge legacy practices constructively to uphold standards and resilience.

Desired Candidate Profile

Experience: Proven record in leading platform or engineering transformations in complex, operationally critical settings including migrating away from monolithic systems to microservices architecture.
DevOps Expertise (DevSecOps a bonus): Experience embedding DevOps/DevSecOps and automation at scale, with a focus on production environments that have commercial implications.
Architectural Credibility: Strong architectural knowledge combined with commercial awareness.
Service Operations Modernization: Experience in aligning service operations with engineering accountability.
Cultural Fit: Energized by building durable systems and developing effective teams.

Tech Stack

Full Stack Development: Design and Build with C#, JavaScript Library (React.js bonus), API Development, SQL Server/Backend Development including ETL/Integration
Azure DevOps: (Repos, Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Test Plans),
CI/CD automation: gated releases, and environment governance
Infrastructure-as-Code: (Bicep, ARM, Terraform)
Containerisation: (Docker, AKS) and serverless (Azure Functions)
Monitoring and observability: (Application Insights, Log Analytics)
Secrets management and vulnerability scanning: (Key Vault, SonarQube, OWASP)
Microservices and event-driven design: (Service Bus, Event Grid, Kafka)
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles

This is an exciting opportunity to play a key role in the digital transformation of this established and successful business as they look to scale and deliver at pace.

Salary: Up to £95kpa + Bonus + Benefits

Location: Peterborough 2 Days per week/Remote

Reporting To: Director of Technology & Data

Background to Role

They are transforming their engineering operations to enhance commercial performance through a product-led approach. The new Head of Engineering will play a crucial role in reshaping platform architecture, embedding resilience, and fostering a culture of ownership among product teams.

We are seeking a Hands-on Technical Leader.

Key Responsibilities

End-to-End Ownership: Manage the entire engineering lifecycle, ensuring accountability from development to production.

Architecture Implementation: You will help shape and implement our platform architecture direction, embed DevSecOps practices, and raise engineering standards across our teams.

Production Readiness: Establish criteria for “production-ready” systems, ensuring stability, observability, security, and resilience.

Service Operations Transformation: Evolve the service desk from reactive to proactive, creating a feedback loop that enhances quality and resilience.

Innovation and Stability: Balance rapid experimentation with the need for reliability and governance, ensuring that once a capability is critical, it is engineered for stability.

Expected Impact (12–18 Months)

Code Quality: Improve standards and apply them consistently across teams.

Incident Management: Reduce incident frequency through structural improvements rather than temporary fixes.

Observability: Enhance operational insights to make performance and risk transparent.

Automation: Increase automation in infrastructure and deployment processes, minimizing manual errors.

Resilience Testing: Ensure disaster recovery processes are credible and not just theoretical.

Leadership & Influence

Collaborative Leadership: Influence engineering structure and hiring, working closely with Product, Data, and Infrastructure teams.

Technical Leadership: Provide confident guidance at senior levels, translating technical realities into business impacts.

Cultural Change: Challenge legacy practices constructively to uphold standards and resilience.

Desired Candidate Profile

Experience: Proven record in leading platform or engineering transformations in complex, operationally critical settings including migrating away from monolithic systems to microservices architecture.

DevOps Expertise (DevSecOps a bonus): Experience embedding DevOps/DevSecOps and automation at scale, with a focus on production environments that have commercial implications.

Architectural Credibility: Strong architectural knowledge combined with commercial awareness.

Service Operations Modernization: Experience in aligning service operations with engineering accountability.

Cultural Fit: Energized by building durable systems and developing effective teams.

Tech Stack

Full Stack Development: Design and Build with C#, JavaScript Library (React.js bonus), API Development, SQL Server/Backend Development including ETL/Integration

Azure DevOps: (Repos, Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Test Plans),

CI/CD automation: gated releases, and environment governance

Infrastructure-as-Code: (Bicep, ARM, Terraform)

Containerisation: (Docker, AKS) and serverless (Azure Functions)

Monitoring and observability: (Application Insights, Log Analytics)

Secrets management and vulnerability scanning: (Key Vault, SonarQube, OWASP)

Microservices and event-driven design: (Service Bus, Event Grid, Kafka)

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles

This is an exciting opportunity to play a key role in the digital transformation of this established and successful business as they look to scale and deliver at pace.