Head of Software Engineering

• Permanent \- Full time

• Travis Perkins plc


• Location: Northampton, Northamptonshire

Core office hours within 8am\-6pm \- 40 hrs a week (flexible)

Northampton

Reference: 52751

Travis Perkins Group is now hiring for an exceptional Head of Software Engineeringto join our senior technology leadership team and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our business.

This is far more than a traditional engineering management role. You'll be a trusted advisor to directors, a leader of a high performing engineering and QA profession and a key contributor to strategic decision making across our enterprise environment.

If you're a commercially minded, strategic technology leader who thrives on improving software delivery, we'd love to hear from you!

This role is based out of Northampton and will require 3 office days per week.

The Opportunity
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As Head of Software Engineering, reporting into the Delivery \& Engagement Director, you will provide strategic leadership and accountability for the delivery of software engineering and test automation across the Travis Perkins Group.

You'll oversee a profession of over 40 permanent colleagues, alongside flexible contract and partner resources. In this role, you will provide financial leadership over local people and third party contract budgets totalling £5m–£7m, ensuring our wider engineering capacity aligns with business demand. You'll also play a key role in driving continuous improvement across software systems, development processes and enterprise wide transformation programmes.

What You'll Be Doing
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• Engineering Leadership:Setting the strategy across all software engineering with regards to tooling, standards and ways of working to ensure cost effective, high quality outcomes.


• Delivery \& Collaboration: Making and fulfilling commitments to deliver value and change at pace while actively championing cross functional collaboration.


• Service \& Security: Driving technology objectives and security policies across the lifecycle, firmly embedding a modern DevSecOps mindset.


• People Development: Leading, coaching and nurturing a large engineering team, developing a robust talent pipeline and building an inclusive, high performance culture.


• Continuous Improvement: Utilising data driven KPIs, metrics and automation to evaluate and recommend new tools and practices that boost development efficiency.


• Financial Management: Proactively managing direct and indirect budgets, identifying efficiency opportunities and aligning with Platforms for FinOps and cloud cost optimisation.


• Contracts \& Partners: Proactively governing and managing third party suppliers, partners and vendors. Including all contractual elements of those relationships.


• Enterprise Leadership:Exerting wider influence outside your direct responsibility to help lead the overall Technology \& Data function and build strong relationships with peers.

You'll be an experienced engineering leader who combines technical expertise with excellent commercial awareness, gravitas and stakeholder management skills.

Essential

• Degree level qualification in Computer Science (or equivalent industry experience).


• Proven leadership experience managing people, large scale budgets (£3m\+), and third\-party vendor ecosystems.


• Proven track record of leading cultural transformation and technical legacy modernisation.


• Strong stakeholder management skills with an exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts for non\-technical executive stakeholders.


• Deep strategic understanding of software lifecycles, systems development, integration, test automation and modern DevSecOps practices.


• Resilient, empowering leadership style with a genuine commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

We'd Particularly Like to See

• Experience operating successfully within a large, disparate enterprise, retail, construction or supply\-chain heavy industry.


• Exposure to ERP implementations or large\-scale digital transformation programmes.


• Familiarity with FinOps principles, advanced information security management frameworks, or emerging tech integration (such as AI/LLMs into the SDLC).


• Industry certifications across Agile/Prince2 methodologies, Service Management (ITIL) or Cloud Architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP).


• Specific domain knowledge of our tech stack (e.g., Rocket Universe, Oracle, Klipboard, Java, React.JS, Kafka).

We know the right leader has options, so we have built a package designed to reward the impact you will make:

• Competitive base salary of plus an annual bonus linked to business performance


• Company car allowance


• Generous pension scheme with matched contributions (based on length of service)


• Save as you earn and share schemes that let you share in the Group's success.


• Colleague discount across Travis Perkins Group brands.


• Private medical cover


• Real career progression within one of the UK's largest merchant groups, with the visibility and scope that comes from a board level role in a high growth business.

This is a highly visible leadership role with significant influence across the organisation. You'll have the opportunity to:

• Shape the overarching software engineering strategy for the UK’s leading group in our sector.


• Lead, coach and develop the largest technology profession within the department.


• Drive meaningful operational improvement by implementing cutting\-edge automation, DevEx principles, and modern tools.


• Contribute directly to critical enterprise transformation initiatives that enable our long\-term business strategy.

If you're an ambitious engineering leader looking for a role that combines strategic influence, operational leadership and commercial impact, we'd love to hear from you.

This listing is from indeed. View original listing ↗