Director of Software Engineering

We’re looking for a Software Engineering Leader to join a Global Financial Service business and be responsible for scaling both Software Engineering and AI capability. This is a highly strategic, hands-on, deeply technical role focused on improving engineering consistency, software delivery maturity and effectiveness across a number of autonomous engineering stacks.

This incredible Software Engineering Leader opportunity offers the scope to reinforce modern best practices — especially in an agentic world — and bring the teams along a journey to a more consistent, modern, AI-native software development lifecycle.

This Software Engineering Leader position will work on a Hybrid format where you’ll be expected to work in both a London and Surrey office 2-3 days per week. The position will offer an annual salary up to £150,000 plus numerous benefits including a high % pension scheme, high % annual bonus, private medical allowance for you and direct family members, educational and training allowance plus lots more!

This role will suit a Hands-On Technical CTO-style leader who succeeds through credibility, judgement and consensus rather than line authority — and who stays close enough to the methodologies associated with software engineering and where necessary, the code, to challenge, guide and, when needed, get directly involved in solving technical problems.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineering Practice & SDLC Maturity: raise the quality and consistency of software design, development, testing and delivery; improve route-to-live, release management, quality gates and CI/CD; reduce manual effort where automation adds value.
• Technical Governance & Consensus: provide constructive, hands-on challenge to engineering and architecture decisions; build alignment across stacks while respecting differing product, commercial and lifecycle needs; support pragmatic technical-debt strategies.
• Tooling & Developer Experience: assess and improve developer experience; standardise and consolidate tooling where it creates clear value (including the move to GitHub as a strategic platform).
• AI Adoption Across the SDLC: drive practical adoption of AI-enabled engineering across development, testing, review, documentation and support, aligned to governance and measurable outcomes.
• Engineering Metrics & Insight: improve visibility of delivery health using frameworks such as DORA and the LinearB pilot; define specific “lighthouse metrics” that reflect real effectiveness, not activity.
• Shared Engineering Capability: reduce duplication across stacks; promote reusable components, patterns and common engineering services where appropriate.

Technology Environment: The environment uses: C#, .NET / .NET Core, Microsoft Azure, GitHub (an increasingly strategic platform), Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipelines and automation, and engineering analytics tooling including the LinearB pilot.

For full information and to be considered for this Software Engineering Leader opportunity, please click the APPLY button and a Spencer Scott representative will make contact.

Spencer Scott Ltd is an equal opportunity Recruitment Agency, which means we do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. We celebrate diversity and are committed to create inclusive working environments for all our clients.