Director, Engineering, UK

Role overview The Director of Engineering leads daily execution across design, development, and delivery within a global product engineering organization responsible for mission-critical information and software systems. The role combines people leadership, technical direction, and process stewardship, with accountability for shipping high-quality features on a steady cadence while maintaining rigorous engineering standards. It oversees managers and software developers supporting national sales contract clients, and champions Scrum and other agile practices across the group.

Responsibilities - Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineering managers and developers, making hiring, performance, and disciplinary decisions to build a strong delivery organization. - Guide teams on architectural and design decisions for application development and deployment, while providing senior-tier escalation support for the wider support function. - Drive adoption of Scrum best practices, including prioritization, resourcing, verification, technical leadership on tasks, project management, and clear status reporting. - Partner with project managers to plan and execute releases, ensuring solutions meet business goals and resolve systems issues end-to-end. - Monitor the health and efficiency of existing applications using forensic performance tooling on client services and servers, communicating restarts when needed and recommending improvements. - Manage budgets tied to licensed software and coordinate approvals with finance, while fostering a culture of ownership and urgency around customer-facing production issues.

Requirements - Significant experience leading engineering managers and software developers within a product engineering or software organization serving enterprise or contract clients. - Deep familiarity with Scrum and agile delivery, automated unit testing, usability, scalability, and service-oriented architecture practices. - Strong software architecture and design skills, with the ability to oversee complex implementation projects and translate business requirements into working systems. - Track record managing release planning, defect resolution, and production support for high-availability or mission-critical platforms. - Comfort balancing technical depth with operational responsibilities such as vendor licensing, expenditure approvals, and cross-functional stakeholder management.

Nice to have - Experience serving clients in public relations, corporate communications, marketing, or media intelligence markets, or with related data and analytics platforms. - Background improving the performance, effectiveness, and efficiency of existing large-scale applications through structured review and modernization initiatives.