WeDo
Director of Engineering
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Director of Engineering
£150,000–£200,000 basic + 30% bonus + 17% pension
Hybrid | Surrey | Financial Services
Wedo has partnered with a globally recognised financial services organisation that builds B2B SaaS products used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
About the Role
This isn't your typical Director of Engineering role.
There are no direct reports. Instead, you'll be the technical leader responsible for raising the engineering bar across a 500-person engineering organisation.
The role is strategic, but you need to be technically credible. You won't be expected to write production code, but you must be comfortable reviewing architecture, understanding frameworks, challenging engineering decisions and getting close enough to the code when needed to solve complex technical problems.
The organisation operates across five autonomous product families. They've intentionally given engineering teams the freedom to move quickly. The next phase is about keeping that autonomy while introducing the right level of engineering consistency, governance and shared tooling.
Success in this role comes from influence rather than authority. You'll build consensus through technical credibility, evidence and good judgement, not hierarchy.
Key Responsibilities
- Raise engineering standards: Improve software design, engineering practices and SDLC maturity across the organisation. Drive improvements in release management, CI/CD, quality gates and automation to increase delivery speed without compromising quality.
- Technical leadership & governance: Provide constructive challenge on architecture and engineering decisions. Help engineering leaders align on best practice while recognising that different products have different commercial and technical needs. Drive pragmatic approaches to technical debt.
- Developer experience: Improve the developer experience across the organisation by simplifying tooling, removing friction and standardising platforms where it delivers genuine value. GitHub is becoming the strategic engineering platform.
- AI across the SDLC: Lead the adoption of AI throughout the engineering lifecycle, from development and testing through to documentation, code review and support. Focus on practical outcomes backed by governance rather than AI for AI's sake.
- Engineering metrics: Increase visibility of engineering performance using DORA metrics, LinearB and other engineering insights. Define meaningful engineering KPIs that measure outcomes rather than activity.
- Shared engineering capability: Reduce duplication across engineering teams by promoting reusable components, common patterns and shared engineering services.
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Requirements
You'll bring:
- Deep technical knowledge with the ability to challenge architecture, system design and engineering decisions.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and senior business leaders.
- Experience building alignment across multiple engineering teams with different priorities.
- A pragmatic approach that balances engineering consistency with team autonomy.
Technical Experience
You'll have strong experience across several of the following:
- Enterprise software engineering
- Large-scale SDLC transformation
- CI/CD and deployment automation
- Cloud-native architecture
- Application design and systems architecture
- Secure software delivery
- Engineering metrics and developer productivity
- Technical debt management
- AI adoption within software engineering
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Technology
The engineering estate includes:
- C#
- .NET /.NET Core
- Microsoft Azure
- GitHub
- Azure DevOps
- CI/CD pipelines
- Engineering analytics tooling including LinearB
You don't need to be hands-on coding but you do need enough technical depth to influence engineering direction and earn the respect of senior engineering leaders.
Background
There's no single route into this role.
You may come from engineering leadership, architecture, platform engineering, developer experience, cloud transformation or a CTO/VP Engineering background.
Experience within financial services, insurance, banking, enterprise SaaS or consulting would be advantageous, particularly within regulated environments where governance, quality and engineering controls matter.
What Success Looks Like
- Consistent engineering standards across five product families.
- A more mature SDLC with faster, higher-quality software delivery.
- Improved developer experience through better tooling and automation.
- Clear engineering metrics that provide meaningful insight into delivery health.
- Greater reuse of engineering capability across the organisation.
- Practical adoption of AI throughout the SDLC.
- The right balance between engineering autonomy and organisational consistency.
Apply
Apply by connecting with Jack Cole and sharing your CV along with why you are right for this position (beyond the experience on your CV)
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