Head of Engineering

About the role

As Head of Engineering, reporting directly to the Managing Director of SME , you will set the vision, strategy, and standards for our entire engineering function, ensuring technology is a driver of growth, scalability, and innovation across Superscript. You’ll lead multiple teams and managers, overseeing the delivery of business-critical initiatives while creating a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

You will be accountable for the performance, output, and strategic alignment of the engineering organisation, working closely with Product, Operations, and the Executive Leadership Team to deliver measurable business value. This role requires both a long-term strategic mindset and the ability to drive short-term execution with precision.

What you'll get up to:

Strategic Leadership & Vision:

• Define and execute the company’s engineering strategy, ensuring alignment with overall business goals.

• Anticipate future technology needs, setting direction for platform evolution, scalability, and resilience.

• Drive adoption of best practices in architecture, engineering quality, and delivery methodology across all teams.

• Own the long-term engineering roadmap, balancing innovation with technical sustainability

Organisation & Capability Growth:

• Build and scale a high-performing engineering organisation, ensuring the right team structures, skills, and leadership are in place.

• Lead and mentor engineering managers, tech leads, and senior engineers to maximise their impact and career growth.

• Forecast hiring needs, manage succession planning, and attract top talent to the organisation.

Delivery Excellence:

• Oversee delivery outcomes for multiple squads and cross-functional teams, ensuring objectives are met on time and to quality standards.

• Monitor performance metrics across engineering to drive productivity, quality, speed of delivery., availability & system performance

• Remove systemic blockers to enable teams to operate at peak performance.

Technical Direction & Standards:

• Set and maintain engineering standards, ensuring security, compliance, and maintainability are embedded in all work.

• Promote technical innovation, encouraging exploration of emerging tools, frameworks, and approaches where they deliver competitive advantage.

• Ensure platform architecture and infrastructure supports current and future business demands.

• Ensure audit readiness for technology controls and change management

• Define, measure and continuously improve engineering KPIs

Governance:

• Ensure systems meet appropriate standards aligned to FCA expectations and Information Security best practice

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Partner with Product, Design, and Operations to ensure technology solutions are fit for purpose and deliver customer value.

• Act as a bridge between technical and non-technical teams, ensuring clear communication and alignment.

• Champion engineering’s voice in business discussions, influencing company-wide decisions with a technical perspective.

Financial & Resource Management:

• Own the engineering budget, ensuring optimal allocation of resources across teams and initiatives.

• Track ROI on major engineering projects, ensuring investment is delivering measurable business impact.

Culture & Leadership:

• Foster a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performance environment across the engineering function.

• Celebrate successes, address performance issues constructively, and build a culture of accountability.

• Lead by example in collaboration, delivery discipline, and professional conduct.

About you:

• Extensive leadership experience in managing multiple engineering teams and managers in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

• Proven track record of delivering large-scale technology initiatives aligned to business strategy.

• Deep technical expertise across software engineering, architecture, and systems design.

• Strong commercial acumen with experience in resource planning and ROI-driven decision making.

• Exceptional stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence at executive level.

In return, we offer you:

• A competitive salary and the ability to grow your career

• 25 days holiday - so there’s plenty of time for work, rest and play

• Hybrid way of working for the perfect work / life balance

• Vitality private health and dental insurance

• Added benefits including competitive pension and salary sacrifice

• Access to financial wellbeing platform Mintago

• Full access to Spill , our mental health platform

• Cycle to work scheme

• Fun and modern office environment with regular team social events

• City of London location