Head of Engineering

TPR grade & pay group: Grade 4 & Digital

Directorate: Digital, Data & Technology

Contract type: Permanent

Location: Brighton:
Hybrid (8 days per month in the office)

Lead and deliver TPR’s software engineering strategy, aligning engineering capabilities, standards and practices with the organisation’s current and future needs. Establish and mature a modern engineering function that enables high-quality, secure and resilient digital services, delivered at pace through effective multidisciplinary teams.

Embed software engineering excellence across TPR by defining and enforcing clear standards, strengthening delivery performance and ensuring consistent, high-quality outcomes across all services and platforms. This includes embedding modern software engineering practices, with particular emphasis on improving delivery flow through:
Test-Driven Development, Dev Ops, Automated Testing, Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment, leveraging AI to accelerate delivery with quality “engineered in” from the outset (Shift-left) and strong observability to strengthen feedback and use learning as a driver for continuous improvement.

Instil a secure by design ethos to enable independent, secure delivery with embedded security practices, architecture and cyber integration.

Act as the Head of Software Engineering Profession, providing leadership across software, platform, quality, infrastructure and Dev Ops engineering disciplines, with matrix responsibility for data engineering capability, ensuring alignment across the broader DDaT ecosystem. Build and sustain a strong engineering capability, supporting recruitment, development and retention of highly skilled technical professionals.

Support the delivery of TPR’s transformation by ensuring engineering is a core, integrated component of the operating model—working effectively alongside Digital, Product, Delivery, Architecture, Cyber and Data functions to deliver measurable outcomes for savers, schemes and employers.

• Extensive experience in a senior software engineering leadership role within a complex organisation, with a strong track record of delivering high-quality user centred digital services at scale.
• Strong leadership and influencing skills, with the ability to engage effectively at senior levels.
• Proven experience of defining and implementing engineering strategies and leveraging AI capabilities that improve delivery performance, quality and resilience.
• Strong experience of establishing and enforcing engineering standards and governance across multiple teams.
• Demonstrable experience of leading software engineering capability development and building high-performing teams in Development, Test and Dev Ops professions.
• Deep technical understanding of modern software engineering approaches, including platform engineering and cloud-native design.
• Excellent presentation and communications skills with responsibility for providing senior technical guidance to project delivery and requires a deep understanding of the modern software engineering discipline.
• Proven experience of defining and delivering Test strategies, including Test-Driven Development and automated testing at scale.
• Extensive experience of “raising the bar” in delivery effectiveness including Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) in an agile, “Path to Live” approach.

Our vision is to use digital, data, and technology to revolutionise pension regulation, making it more efficient, secure, transparent, and customer centred. We believe only our people can change things. In DDaT, we're customer obsessed, whether the customer is a saver, scheme provider, a user in one of our teams or one of our immediate colleagues. We focus on outcomes, are willing to experiment, collaborate and learn with our colleagues.

We need brilliant people to help bring our ambitions to life.

• Genuine opportunities for learning and development.
• Hybrid working and flexible shift patterns.
• A vibrant workplace with employee networks (Disability, Family, LGBT+, Minority Ethnic, Mental Health, Women’s).

We offer 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays, a hybrid…