Software Engineering Director

The Software Engineering Director is a senior technology leader responsible for driving engineering excellence, organisational scaling, and operational performance across ITG & Storyteq’s global development organisation. This role leads multiple Group Engineering Managers, Quality Engineering and is accountable for people leadership, delivery operations, international hub expansion, and long-term technical quality.

Partnering closely with Product, Platform, Tech Operations, Support, and the wider R&D leadership team, the Director ensures our engineering organisation operates predictably, efficiently, and in alignment with ITG & Storyteq’s strategic objectives. This role is critical in shaping and executing the future of our multi-product platform, ensuring teams deliver world-class quality, reliability, and innovation at scale.

Please note that this role can be UK or Amsterdam based, with travel required to development hubs in London, Amsterdam and Cape Town.

Key Responsibilities

1. Organisational & People Leadership

• Leadership of Engineering Management: Lead, mentor, and develop Group Engineering Managers and Heads of function within Product engineering, providing strategic support and coaching to ensure they build sustainable, cost effective, high-performing, scalable teams.
• Talent Development: Cultivate a culture of excellence, learning, and accountability across all engineering functions. Ensure clear development pathways for leads, seniors, and individual contributors.
• Performance Leadership: Identify organisational performance issues and implement corrective strategies that improve team velocity, morale, and long-term capability.
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Act as a senior R&D leadership partner, aligning engineering operations with business priorities across Product, Platform, Support, and GTM functions.
• Organisational Insight: Maintain regular skip-level conversations to ensure clarity on team sentiment, operational risks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Quality Engineering Ownership: Provide strategic leadership for Quality Engineering across all products and teams, ensuring robust testing frameworks, automation strategies including AI, and quality processes are embedded throughout the SDLC.

2. Delivery Excellence & SDLC Ownership

• Process Stewardship: Own, continuously refine, and evolve the maturity of the SDLC, ensuring modern, scalable, and measurable engineering processes across all hubs.
• Predictable Delivery: Drive planning, estimation quality, and delivery predictability across multi-team, multi-product programmes.
• Risk & Escalation Management: Identify projects or teams at risk and implement structured recovery plans.
• Metrics‑Driven Operations: Define, track, and optimise key engineering KPIs (including DORA metrics), and embed data-led performance management across the organisation.
• AI & Tooling Innovation: Lead the evaluation and adoption of AI tooling and modern development practices to enhance team velocity, code quality, and automation.

3. Global Hub Strategy & Expansion

• Hub Establishment Leadership: Own the setup, scaling, operational excellence, and cultural integration of existing & new engineering hubs.
• Workforce Planning: Identify capability gaps, create strategic hiring & budget plans that balance cost, skill requirements, and long-term organisational design.
• Hiring Leadership: Participate directly in the recruitment and assessment of senior and mid‑level engineers within new hubs to ensure top-quality hires.
• Operational Alignment: Ensure new hubs adopt consistent processes, culture, engineering standards, and platform knowledge.

4. Technology, Quality & Platform Stewardship

• Quality Ownership: Collaborate closely with the Product Support function to identify systemic quality issues and drive prioritised resolution.
• Technical Roadmapping: Identify and champion investment in technical debt, platform resilience, and architectural evolution across products.
• Innovation Leadership: Evaluate emerging technologies, AI capabilities, and third‑party services that can accelerate product value, reduce cost, or improve developer experience.
• Documentation & Knowledge Culture: Ensure engineering teams consistently capture domain knowledge, system design, and operational procedures in relevant platforms (e.g., wiki, Confluence).
• Vendor & Partner Management: Oversee relationships with external vendors and service providers supporting engineering delivery.

• 8+ years of technical leadership experience, including managing multiple product engineering teams and managers in a scaled software engineering organisation.
• Experience in a multi-product integrated SaaS environment. 
• Proven success driving engineering maturity within Agile/Scrum environments and owning end-to-end SDLC optimisation including Quality Assurance/Engineering.
• Demonstrable experience scaling engineering teams internationally, including establishing new hubs or distributed teams.
• Strong track record of driving improvements using engineering metrics and implementing modern tooling (including AI-based development accelerators).
• Experience in cloud-native, microservices-oriented, and API-led architectures.

Work’s a treat

On top of a competitive salary, you can expect a whole load of perks:

• 25 days’ holiday + bank holidays – we understand the importance of you getting some downtime.
• Annual Wellbeing Day – enjoy an additional day on us to look after your physical and mental well-being.
• Pension Scheme – helping you save towards your retirement home in the sun!
• Corporate Medical Cash Plan – claim back the cost of your medical treatments.
• So many savings – through our online community platform, you can access dozens of daily deals, from money off top brands to discounts on days out.
• Employee Assistance Programme – our people are at the heart of everything we do, so if you’re happy, we’re happy.
• Cycle to Work Scheme – save on the cost of biking to work.
• Monthly Employee Awards - Employee of the Month program with £250 bonus
• Raising money for charity including a paid Volunteer Day – we’re all about giving back… and having lots of fun in the process!
• Referral scheme – know the perfect person to join the team? You could bag £1,000 for putting a good word in.
• Wellbeing Programme – giving you the opportunity to join regular, interactive Wellbeing Workshops or join our 30-plus Wellbeing Champions.
• Enhanced Family Friendly Leave – support for you and your family to help you navigate through the craziness of family life.

We Value Diversity

We champion and welcome diversity in our workforce and ensure all job applicants receive equal and fair treatment, regardless of age, race, gender or gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or nationality.

We are not only committed to increasing the visibility and recognition of talent from under-represented groups within our organisation but the wider industry too.

At the end of the day, we make sure we take time to look after ourselves, each other, and the planet because we’re always stronger together.

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