Director of Engineering

About the role 

Within Haleon, the Engineering Director (Operational Engineering) is a pivotal senior leadership role, focused on steering multiple engineering squads towards achieving impactful strategic objectives, measured via Objective and Key Results (OKRs). This position requires a dynamic leader with extremely strong technical background in enterprise software development and the ability to inspire and guide teams towards delivering business value at pace.  This role emphasizes leadership, planning, technical prowess and team development, whilst ensuring alignment with overarching business goals. 

The role will focus on leading operational capabilities including Site Reliability Engineering, First Line Support, Quality Centre of Excellence and the build and run of shared capability platforms such as content, identity and API management. 

Key responsibilities 

• Experienced senior leader, responsible for leading multiple software engineering squads, with ownership of technical roadmaps, setting Objective and Key Results (OKRs) for the teams and tracking progress throughout the year. 

• Set an annual budget and forecast with a full understanding the Operating Expenditure (OPEX) and Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) requirements across the engineering group, specifically, financial forecasts and resource plans. 

• Contract and engage with suppliers, to manage product and staffing procurement. 

• Partnering with squads across the function to drive site reliability engineering and quality assurance. 

• Drive engineering excellence across the organisation in software development, enterprise architecture, automation, observability, quality and cyber security.  

• Create quarterly increment plans, coordinating and synchronizing releases across interdependent teams. 

• Articulate risk of technical problems to non-technical stakeholders (e.g. legal, compliance) and communicate effectively when representing Engineering to external stakeholders (e.g. auditors, regulators, third-parties, or industry groups) when appropriate. 

• Demonstrate product-awareness, offering valuable contributions to quarterly planning rituals, working with Product Managers or team leads to set the vision for each team. 

• Proactively tackle strategic issues facing into the business, developing cohesive and actionable plans to overcome significant business challenges.  

• Contribute to the mentorship and growth of engineers, through sponsoring, mentoring and providing constructive, candid feedback.  

• Establish and maintain Service Management framework across engineering organization, which complies to ITIL best practices. 

Qualifications and skills 

Essential 

• Extensive experience in software engineering leadership roles, preferably within a global organization. 

• Proven track record of successfully managing and scaling Agile engineering teams. 

• Strong understanding of software development methodologies and best practices. 

• Deep technical domain expertise, combined with programming language expertise (e.g. JavaScript/TypeScript), database technologies (e.g. NoSQL, SQL), cloud platforms (e.g. Azure) and release & configuration management tools. 

• Experience and comprehensive understanding of modern DevOps platform technologies, specifically GitHub Actions, infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Ansible) and containerisation (e.g. Kubernetes, AKS).  

• Experience with code quality and code security tools (e.g. GitHub CodeQL, & Dependabot). 

• Understanding of ITIL standards and service management best practices. 

• Excellent communication, leadership and interpersonal skills. 

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, adapting the team to handle changing business priorities or urgency. 

Preferred 

• 10+ years of programming and / or platform & systems engineering. 

• 5+ years of managing technical teams with a strong track record of change responsibilities. 

• Functional & Technical Expert with deep domain & Engineering management expertise and experience relevant to Haleon's scale and complexity. 

• Extensive demonstrable leadership. 

• Bachelor’s / Master’s degree in Computer Science / MBA / related field