Head of Engineering

The role holder will take the lead in building best in class Engineering capabilities used in technology solutions that deliver the business outcomes across BTG.  They will play a key role in ensuring the achievement of the Objectives and Key Results as agreed with the Chief Engineer and help to drive the Engineering strategy with insight that inspires and enables innovative technical solutions.

They will define and promote the engineering best practices across the team and work with the CTO teams and CISO teams to ensure that the technical solution aligns with technology roadmaps and architecture strategy.

They are responsible for building the engineering people competency and capacity in line with business strategy and change investment plans. In this regard they will also build long term strategic relationships with SI and resource partners.

Working across and with the wider technology organization, they will help remove technology and engineering related impediments, resolve technical constraints and escalations, and be a champion for the engineering excellence.

Accountabilities

• Engineering strategy for full stack, APIs, front end and mobile development.
• Defining and promoting best practices, development standards and quality of the delivery of the Engineers within the capability.
• Owner and role model for living the following values: productivity, quality, transparency, and openness over internal politics.
• Managing chapters and engineering capacity and competency for Full Stack, APIs, Front End and Mobile development.
• Providing open and effective communication channels leading to greater knowledge transfer across the Tribe.     
• Ensuring that each technical solution follows architectural governance processes as set out by the CTO function and aligns with the target state for Engineering.
• Metrics driven continuous improvements to the engineering capabilities resulting in increased agility and stability.
• Managing the engineering related technical debt process and ownership over associated epics. 

Responsibilities

• Providing line management duties for Chapter Leads with a view to focussing on coaching and mentoring techniques that align to both agile principles and Admiral values.
• Building smooth onboarding and best engineering experience for the community in scope.
• Ensuring adherence to best practices and engineering standards on the creation of technical solutions for the Tribe epics/stories, collaborating across the teams to ensure solutions are delivered are aligned to target engineering strategy.
• Continuously building “outside-in” perspective and a laser focus on developing an engineering led culture.
• Providing technical leadership and engineering guidance to engineers in the Tribe resolving technical constraints and roadblocks faced by the Squads
• Building fast flow in engineering processes removing impediments to agility and codifying controls and delivering high levels of automation.
• Embedding and maturing platform engineering concepts for scale and reuse.
• Ensuring that the technical team is working to help achieve the technology strategy of Admiral UK and is an active contributor to the strategic agenda
• Ensuring consistency of approaches across the various tribes and teams related to the capabilities in scope.
• Identifying and implementing continuous improvements to the engineering processes for the Tribes resulting in increased efficiency or enabling greater ROI
• Enabling cross tribe communities of practice and platform for sharing knowledge and best practices.
• Implementing the SI partners and location strategies as defined the Chief Engineer and Director of IT.

Key interactions

• Coaches chapter leads, engineers and technical people in the Tribes
• Collaborates and consults with Enterprise Architecture and supports the EA strategy and agenda.
• Collaborates and consults with Platform Engineering and Cloud infrastructure teams.
• Collaborates and consults with technical governance functions e.g. InfoSec, Data Governance etc.
• Collaborates and consults with Heads of Capabilities in the Chief Engineering organisation
• Supports Head of IT, Principal Engineer and Chief Engineer in Change and portfolio planning.

Knowledge and Experience Required

• Extensive Knowledge and experience with Line management through both coaching and mentoring techniques.
• Extensive knowledge and understanding of setting up engineering functions for scale and speed.
• Extensive knowledge of identification and management of engineering, design and testing standards and practices that comply with internal organisation IT governance and architectural standards within a heavily regulated environment.
• Expert knowledge and hands on experience of setting up / improving development processes and practices like peer reviews, CI/CD pipelines, embedding automated governance and controls, TDD /BDD, security by design and building resilient solutions.
• Extensive knowledge and experience in design and development across all engineering disciplines.
• Extensive knowledge around Application Server solutions EG, JBOSS, Apache Tomcat, Cloud applications and services such as Azure, GCP & AWS, API’s, Microservices and containerisation.
• Experience operating within heavily regulated environments including external regulated consumer products and service offerings.
• Experience and knowledge of CISO governance frameworks, standards, controls and auditing documentation covering both business and technology solutions currently within product backlogs.
• Good understanding of Platform Engineering and Cloud engineering concepts.
• Knowledge and experience of Mobile & App development and capabilities.
• Knowledge and experience with 3^rd party service providers including facilitation of RFP, onboarding, and performance management (design of SLA and overall KPI).
• Knowledge of insurance technologies preferred e.g. Guidewire core and digital products.
• Knowledge and experience in the use of tools such as: Jira, Confluence etc.

Professional Training Requirements

• Expectation is that they would require specific domain, technology type qualifications dependent upon expected backlog technical outcomes (subject matter qualifications)
• Professional Cloud Solutions Architect Certification – example for Cloud based professional qualification (desirable)
• TOGAF 9.0 (desirable)
• SAFe® 5 Agilist certification or equivalent (desirable)

Our Commitment to You

At Admiral, we are committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. Admiral is proud to be an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other legally protected status.

All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment.

Salary, Benefits, and Work-Life Balance

We do not have a set salary for this position, as it will be dependent on the successful candidate’s experience. We are happy to see CVs from all candidates who meet the requirements and will be happy to discuss the remuneration package.

At Admiral, we are proud to be a diverse business where we put our people and customers first. We have great benefits to ensure employees have a great work-life balance; it's one of the reasons we’re consistently voted one of the Sunday Times Best Big Companies to work for in the UK. We want you to have an element of freedom to define a working lifestyle that supports this, so accommodate flexible hours wherever possible.

All colleagues will receive 33 days holiday (including banks holidays) when they join us, and this will increase with length of service, up to a maximum of 38 days (including banks holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to five days of annual leave in addition to your allocation.

You can also view some of our other key benefits here.

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