Executive Director Engineering

Role Overview

As Executive Director, Engineering, your responsibilities will include:

Design, development and delivery of the client’s digital platforms: develop the products that will provide differentiating digital services both to internal teams looking to automate and improve their operations, as well as our institutional client base who are keen to consume business data in more modern and automated way.

Build and Lead a High-Performing Engineering Team: Guide, mentor, and inspire a team of thoughtful and strategic software professionals, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation. Rapidly add skills where needed to create an organization capable of hands-on delivery, business partnership and thought leadership across the technology organization. Design the right OKRs, KPIs and KBIs to drive velocity, excellent collaboration with stakeholders, quality and sustainability in all our digital products.

Industrialize and scale business automation: taking leadership of the existing and very well-regarded Digital Solutions & Enablement team, through the existing AVP of Digital Solutions & Enablement, who deliver quick-to-market solutions for businesses leveraging a variety of low-code platforms. Introduce engineering best practices to the team, ensuring their operating model and deliveries meet necessary standards of sustainability, resilience and compliance. Ensure the team can deliver reliably and in control as they scale 2-3x in the coming year.

Stand-up the client’s software development environment: develop the standards, processes, SDLC, QA/QE, CI/CD, monitoring and continuous delivery frameworks to operate with pace, control and transparency. Implement practices and tooling that supports an ownership culture of our platforms from within the Engineering organization, focused on continuous, iterative improvement, stability and collaboration with the business.

Provide vision for the client’s cloud and data platforms: Leveraging our enterprise- and business architects, develop a technical and operational platform model that ensures long-term success through sound technology choices and design, remaining current with emerging technologies while achieving scale, adaptability and control across our solutions. Ensure platform are designed and built with necessary controls, sustainability and growth in mind from day-1.

Define the strategic technology needs in the client’s roadmap: Contribute technical and engineering input to the overall client Technology strategy and roadmap. Detail the elements in our digital platform architecture and sequencing to achieve their maturity, aligned to business objectives, while interlocking with Business System, Data and AI strategy.

Provide critical access to key data: Alongside the Vice President, Data, work with internal business functions and our clients to understand the data that is key to their operations, how to best serve that to them and how value can be added through responsiveness, automation, analytics and insights. Develop a digital product suite that puts the right data in the hands of the right users through frictionless and compelling experiences.

Embed AI and Automations as standard: In collaboration with the Assistant Vice President, AI, experiment to understand where AI and ML technologies can both expedite the engineering team’s work and add differentiating capabilities to our digital products. Support the Engineering team and colleagues more wide to leverage AI every day, using it to expedite delivery, improve quality and stability of platforms, and create value-add solutions.

Drive innovation, experimentation and creativity: Act as a thought leader for best practices in software development, DevSecOps, and agile methodologies, ensuring their adoption throughout the lifecycle. Remain current with emerging technologies and actively seek new partners who may provide competitive edge in our digital products, while challenging existing vendors to innovate. Build a fail-fast culture, promoting the value of learning through every experiment.

Create an engineering culture focused on business outcomes: Develop an operating model where the benefit to the firm or our clients is understood and held centrally in every technical enhancement. Collaborate with stakeholders to learn our business and act as a critical and collaborative partner in designing, prioritizing and specifying our digital platforms.

Enable and catalyze citizen development: Identify technology initiatives throughout our business, providing active dialogue with leaders to understand where the Technology group can add value to those activities. Bring awareness of engineering discipline to help in achieving control, robustness and scale, including standing-up centralized centers of excellence within Technology where a business-led innovation can provide value across the organization.

Actively drive 3rd party relationships: Build a culture of strong and active partnership with key vendors, both holding them accountable to deliver on our expectations and working with them to identify innovations which they can provide. Develop a small set of technical 3rd party relationships getting the most for each one, and ensuring partners understand the two-way nature of their collaboration with the client.

Deliver control and resilience above all else: Ensure the Technology team are sufficiently curious and knowledgeable to seek input from all relevant stakeholders, ensuring captured business objectives include all functional and non-functional needs. Remain aware of the regulated nature of our operation environment and business-critical nature of the systems the team are delivering. Work in lockstep with the Assistant Vice President, Technology Operations and Vice President, Technology Governance & Security to develop solutions that meet our ongoing needs as a business, and create tight feedback loops.

Key Outcomes

A Modern Engineering Platform: Architect and deliver a scalable, secure, and innovative platform for the client’s internal and external-facing technology, positioning the organization for control, scale, resilience and agility in its digital strategy.

A compelling digital product suite: Deliver products that matter to our clients and enable enhanced ways of working to our colleagues. Leveraging collaboration and iterative, agile ways of working, enhance and these to meet the needs of an increasingly digitally-driven industry.

A high-performing technology team: Create an engineering function comprised of staff and partners who excel at partnership, innovation and velocity. Build a strong technical capability in an engaged engineering organization who hold themselves accountable for continuously improving how they work to achieve greater business outcomes.

Consistently high control and resilience: Architect, design and deliver products and platforms that have robust, transparent controls embedded and operate at a high level of availability, performance and security.

Scaled delivery capabilities: Where successful key technology adoption in the business can be applied strategically across the organization, centralize the key skills, tools and responsibilities in order to scale its use with control and pace.

Effective partnerships and collaboration: An engineering culture of working across organizational silos and boundaries to understand business outcomes, objectives and results, and active, transparent collaboration in delivery.

Successfully operating within constraints: Managing budgets, timelines, resources and dependencies taking into account realities of the operating environment, including regulation, BAU needs, investment priorities for your own and other teams.

Representing the organization: As a senior member of the leadership team in a growing and strategically-important part of the organization, become comfortable discussing deliveries, strategy, industry trends and your own thought leadership to an internal and external, public audience.

Strategic Impact: Enable AI, data, and transformation initiatives with high-quality, accessible digital platforms, driving measurable business results and competitive advantage.

About You

You are a thoughtful, technically skilled collaborator with a track record of building and leading engineering teams in complex environments. You thrive in hands-on roles, balancing strategic vision with the ability to execute and deliver solutions as part of a small team. You bring an appreciation for the nuances of operating in a regulated industry, and experience in all elements of the software lifecycle. A subject matter expert in software, SaaS and cloud platforms, you are able to translate complex concept into “so-what” for business leaders, while supporting your team to achieve their deliverables at a high standard. Energetic and passionate about your field, you drive yourself, your team and colleagues to continuously improve, reacting to feedback from the right metrics and remaining focused on business outcomes.