Director of engineering - Accounts

This is a flexible-hybrid position with two days a week in our London office and occasional travelling to Edinburgh or Bath each quarter.

Seccl is the Octopus-owned embedded investment platform that’s on a mission to helping more people to invest – and invest well.

We’re B-Corp certified with an amazing product-market fit, impressive early traction and the potential to transform an outdated industry, for the better. We've been growing fast and will scale even faster over the next few years.

We’re also proud to be part of Octopus, the £multi billion group that's on a mission to breathe new life into broken industries, through companies like Octopus Energy, Octopus Investments and Octopus Money.

Check out the Seccl website for the latest on our products and our mission to shape the future of investments.

• Lead the long-term technical strategy, organisational design and engineering excellence for the Accounts domain — the foundation of every investor journey on Seccl.
• Provide collaborative leadership across architecture, risk, delivery and team growth in one of Seccl’s most business-critical and regulated domains.
• Report directly to the CTO and partner closely with the Group Product Manager for Accounts in a dual-leadership model.
• Guide the technical direction for 4–6 squads, ensuring scalable architecture, engineering quality and reliable delivery.
• Develop and enable Engineering Managers, embedding a culture of Ownership and shared accountability through a ‘build it, run it’ approach.
• Operate within a domain with deep regulatory responsibility, technical complexity and a broad product footprint — spanning backend services, event-driven flows, APIs and customer-facing UI.

• Delivered a clear multi-year Accounts technical roadmap aligned to product and compliance priorities.
• Improved DORA and reliability metrics, reducing operational risk.
• Strengthened the Engineering Manager, Staff and Principal engineering bench with clear succession depth.
• Scaled organisational design to sustain flow, autonomy and effective delivery as Seccl grows.

• Set and communicate the technical vision and strategy for the Accounts tribe, shaping direction 6–18 months ahead.
• Guide architectural decisions that ensure scalability, resilience and compliance.
• Work with Staff and Principal Engineers to define and evolve architectural guardrails, patterns and platform capabilities.
• Partner with the Group Product Manager to align technical and product priorities for maximum customer impact.
• Lead and coach Engineering Managers, enabling their growth and technical leadership.
• Advocate best practices and frameworks (e.g., AWS Well-Architected Framework) across squads.
• Ensure operational excellence and reliability in delivery, embedding a ‘build it, run it’ culture.
• Design, refine and evolve the organisational structure of the Accounts tribe to ensure long‑term flow, autonomy and Ownership.
• Build succession plans, strengthen leadership pipelines and uplift engineering management capability.
• Influence company‑wide engineering standards, frameworks and technical strategy as part of the Engineering Leadership Team.
• Drive safe, measurable adoption of AI‑assisted engineering (UI acceleration, test generation, migration tooling), with appropriate governance for IP, security and compliance.
• Promote continuous improvement in processes, tooling and engineering culture.
• Partner with Compliance, Risk, Security and Operations to embed robust engineering governance, technical controls and audit readiness.
• Shape and manage cloud spend, operational cost‑to‑serve and vendor relationships across the Accounts domain.

• Have experience leading multiple engineering squads in a high‑growth, cloud‑native environment.
• Have experience leading 20–40+ engineers through managers, Staff engineers and senior individual contributors.
• Have owned multi‑year technical and organisational strategies, ideally within regulated or high‑integrity domains.
• Understand AWS/serverless architecture and modern engineering practices.
• Enjoy shaping operating models, delivery frameworks and engineering cultures.
• Can…