Head of Product Engineering- Cheltenham, UK- Permanent Opportunity

I am currently working with a leading educational tech organisation who are looking for an experience Head of Product Engineering to join their Digital and Data team in Cheltenham for a permanent opportunity.

The role:
This is an excellent opportunity for a customer-centric Head of Product Engineering to head their multidisciplinary development and test teams. You will provide technical guidance, vision, and leadership to their engineering teams, using new and old technologies to ensure their products are reliable, proven, and most importantly, satisfy the needs of their consumers.

Their products make a difference in the lives of their customers, and they will look to you to assist them with building out of their existing systems and services to offer innovative and scalable new features/products.

Responsibilities:
*To provide technical leadership and direction for the creation and construction of all products and services, as well as advise the business on how to improve and deliver their products and services through technology.
*To oversee the product engineering pipeline for all the organisations software product lines, prioritising development activities and ensuring that they are carried out in accordance with corporate goals.
*Participation in the whole product development life cycle, ensuring that products are developed to scale and that security and recovery requirements are agreed upon across the technology department.
*To guarantee that product development is informed by a thorough understanding of customer demands, and to resource product delivery according to agreed-upon engineering pipelines with the Head of Product Management.
*To lead multi-disciplinary teams of product owners, business analysts, and software engineers to produce high-quality, innovative, and robust software for public release, overseeing complicated technical projects (build, test, and deploy) and guaranteeing technical delivery of the product roadmap.
*To collaborate with the Head of Platform Engineering to develop and inform the underlying platform capabilities that will speed up product engineering, such as automation, reuse, and technological consistency across software product lines.
*To encourage internal teams and vendors to work together to fix, repair, and improve existing products and services. Ensure that all consumers receive the most benefit and have the best user experience possible.
*To guarantee that all products adhere to architectural principles and standards, and that they are created to take use of shared platform capabilities.
*To strike a balance between the requirement to supply features that assist the business and the risk of accruing technical debt.

Technical experience:
*Knowledge of .NET, Salesforce, MuleSoft, AWS Redshift and Angular desirable.
*Knowledge of relational databases, ideally MySQL and/or PostgreSQL.
*Extensive experience of leveraging DevOps practices and automation technologies to drive
*rapid product engineering and deployment and managing a CI/CD pipeline.
*A deep understand of cloud-centric development and operating models leveraging IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS capabilities to deliver customer-focussed products.

Experience needed:
*Has substantial expertise leading large-scale and challenging technical projects, including creating and deploying large-scale online and mobile applications that improve user experience, in an agile product engineering environment.
*Has demonstrated success in establishing, evolving, and leading a 'Product' organisation. Creating and operating software products with a variety of sourcing strategies, such as insourcing and outsourcing to third-party technology providers.
*Has a thorough understanding of product engineering principles and how to apply them to provide quick, test-driven product engineering services to get goods to customers faster.
*Leads with a passion for product development, empathises with customers and their needs, and is determined to create solutions that add value to customers' lives while addressing any technical difficulties that may prohibit this.
*Has demonstrated expertise managing diverse teams with a focus on product delivery in a constantly changing environment, and is able to quickly adapt to changing requirements, even if they arise later in the product development process.
*Significant experience with extending and replacing old technology and services
*Has extensive knowledge and experience with agile delivery concepts and techniques (preferably includes SAFe) to enable continual improvement and delivery of all services and products.
*Ability to make technical decisions by keeping up with related technology advancements.
*The ability to cope in a technically complicated and rapidly changing environment, as well as the ability to respond calmly and sensibly to changing aspirations in a deadline-driven circumstance.
*Excellent planning and organisational skills, including the ability to handle multiple work streams at once while balancing business priorities and quality.
*Strong communication abilities, including the ability to present, discuss, and explain topics in a logical and cohesive manner, both in writing and verbally.
*Ability to prioritise and take a pragmatic approach to balancing conflicting and shifting needs. Has significant people management and leadership expertise, as well as the ability to manage/Matrix manage several scrum teams across several technologies.
*Demonstrates advanced knowledge of leadership principles, methods, and strategies, particularly change management and driving cultural change.
*Demonstrates the ability to scale resources, skills, and collaborate with an offshore technology partner to balance onshore and offshore capacity.

If you are interested or would like to find out more information, please send your CV to: (see below)