Wealthify
Head of Engineering
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Head of Engineering
Engineering leadership role accountable for Wealthify's engineering capability, delivery and craft.
Launched in 2016, Wealthify is an ambitious, multi-award-winning, digital investment platform owned and backed by Aviva.
We blend easy-to-use technology with expert stock market management, to make it really simple for people to invest with confidence and we're looking for the very best talent to help us achieve this.
As a company, we value simplicity, speed, trust, and teamwork.
We listen to, learn from, and back each other, creating an environment where everyone feels respected, confident, and comfortable voicing their opinions.
So, if that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, this could be your perfect opportunity to join us.
Reports to: Chief Product & Technology Officer
Team size: Approx. 25 engineers and testers across 3 squads
Direct reports: Tech Leads, Lead Automation Tester, DevOps Lead
Location: Hybrid · Penarth
Level: Senior leadership within the CPTO function
About the role
Wealthify is growing the CPTO function by creating a new Head of Engineering role. The role holder will take day-to-day accountability for the engineering and test organisation, partnering with the Head of Product, Head of Design and Head of Data to deliver Wealthify's roadmap.
This is a high-impact leadership role for an engineer-manager who is as comfortable shaping team culture and career paths as they are scrutinising delivery metrics, incident response and production quality. You will set the bar for engineering excellence at Wealthify, how we build software — including embedding agentic coding and AI across the SWE lifecycle — and own the cadence and quality of everything we ship.
Key responsibilities
Roadmap delivery & product partnership
- Partner with the Head of Product as the senior engineering counterpart, jointly owning the delivery of the product roadmap and quarterly outcomes.
- Translate product intent into technical strategy, sequencing and realistic commitments; proactively surface trade-offs between scope, quality and time.
- Represent engineering in roadmap, prioritisation and investment conversations, ensuring engineering effort is clearly connected to customer and business outcomes.
- Build a shared operating rhythm between Product and Engineering — planning, review, retrospective and continuous-improvement cycles.
People leadership & engineering capability
- Hold end-to-end accountability for the engineering and QA organisation — including software engineers, app developers, web engineers, automation testers and developer support.
- Own hiring across the function: workforce planning, defining the engineering competency framework, running a rigorous and inclusive interview process, and protecting the hiring bar.
- Develop people: set clear expectations at every level, run meaningful career conversations, build individual development plans, and grow leaders and specialists from within.
- Manage performance directly and fairly — calibrating across the team, recognising strong contribution, and addressing under-performance early and constructively.
- Shape engineering culture: psychological safety, high standards, craft pride, inclusion, and a shared sense of ownership for what we ship.
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Delivery capability, cadence & throughput
- Own Wealthify's engineering delivery capability — the ability to ship working, high-quality software at a predictable cadence.
- Embed DORA as the primary engineering health dashboard: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service. Use the numbers to drive continuous improvement rather than as a scorecard.
- Drive throughput and flow: reduce work-in-progress, shorten cycle time, eliminate hand-offs, and remove the organisational friction that slows teams down.
- Invest in the inner loop — build times, developer experience, CI/CD, test automation, trunk-based workflows and deployment safety — so engineers spend their time on meaningful work.
- Set and hold engineering standards: coding standards, code review, testing pyramid, architecture review, and technical-debt management.
Reliability, incidents & production quality
- Own the DevOps and Dev Support function: production reliability, observability, alerting, on-call health and service-level objectives for Wealthify's engineering-owned systems.
- Own engineering incident management end-to-end: preparedness, response rhythm, communication, post-incident review and follow-through on actions — fostering a blameless culture that learns from every incident.
- Own bug management: prioritisation, ageing, service-level targets for defects, and the feedback loop between production issues and engineering quality.
- Maintain a clear, shared view of production health and risk, and make it visible to CPTO and wider stakeholders.
AI-enabled engineering
- Lead the adoption of agentic coding tools and AI assistance across the full software-engineering lifecycle — from discovery and design, through implementation, review, testing and operations.
- Set the policy for safe and effective AI use in engineering: tooling choice, data handling, IP protection, review expectations, and quality gates.
- Measure the impact of AI adoption on DORA metrics, developer experience and engineering quality — and iterate based on evidence, not hype.
- Grow AI-fluency in the engineering team through enablement, pairing, internal guilds and hiring; make effective use of AI an expected engineering skill, not a specialism.
- Partner with the CPTO on the broader AI agenda for Wealthify, ensuring engineering contributes directly to — and benefits from — that strategy.
Technology strategy & architecture
- Partner with the CPTO on technology strategy, architectural direction and build-vs-buy decisions.
- Own the engineering contribution to non-functional requirements — security, resilience, performance, compliance and regulatory obligations in an FCA-regulated environment.
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Ways of working & stakeholder management
- Represent engineering confidently with SLT, wider Aviva technology leadership, Product and Design, and external partners.
- Be the senior engineering escalation point for delivery, quality, reliability and people matters.
- Champion an engaged, transparent engineering community — all-hands, demos, guilds and written communication.
What you'll bring
We don't expect everyone to apply with every one of these. If you meet most of the core criteria and are motivated by the rest, please apply — we'd rather have the conversation than miss you.
Essential
- Experience leading engineering teams — as a Head of Engineering, senior Engineering Manager, or in an equivalent role — in a customer-facing product environment.
- Experience delivering product roadmaps in close partnership with a Head of Product or equivalent.
- Enough technical depth to make sound architectural and delivery decisions, and to work closely with senior engineers on theirs.
- Experience using delivery metrics to improve throughput, quality and developer experience.
- Experience with production ownership: SRE, developer support, incident management and bug management.
- Experience recruiting, growing and supporting engineers across a range of levels, including through performance conversations.
- Interest in agentic coding and AI in the software-engineering lifecycle, and ideally some practical experience introducing these tools to a team.
- Clear communication and stakeholder management, and comfort representing engineering to SLT and wider leadership.
Also valuable
- Experience in a regulated environment — fintech, wealth, investments or comparable.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure especially), modern web and mobile stacks, and CI/CD tooling.
- Experience leading through organisational change or growth.
- Experience running or supporting engineering communities, guilds or internal tech forums.
Why this role
This is an opportunity to shape the engineering organisation of a growing digital-first investment business, with the backing and scale of Aviva behind it. You will inherit a capable and collegial team, a CPTO who is committed to their success, and a clear mandate to raise the bar on delivery, quality and engineering craft — including being at the leading edge of how AI reshapes software engineering.
Compensation and benefits
- Salary – up to £100k depending on experience
- 24 days of holiday a year (with an additional day’s holiday for each full year served, up to 28 days)
- Annual discretionary bonus, linked to company and individual performance.
- Private Medical Insurance
- Death in Service Cover (3 times annual salary)
- Income Protection Insurance
- Company Pension Plan, with matched contributions up to 6% of base salary
- Free office gym
- Free parking
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