Head of Engineering

We are a global investment company that helps clients and customers to plan, save and invest for the future. By doing so, we enable our clients and customers to be better investors. Strengthening talent and culture is one of our strategic priorities. We strive to make abrdn a great place to work so that we can attract and retain the industry’s best talent.

Our people put our stakeholders at the heart of everything they do by helping us to make a positive difference to the lives of our clients, customers, colleagues, shareholders and society.

abrdn comprises three businesses, Investments, Adviser and interactive investor (ii), each of which focuses on meeting and adapting to our clients’ evolving needs.

• Investments manages £368bn of client assets, offering investment capabilities built on the strength of our insights from wide-ranging research, worldwide investment expertise and local market knowledge.
• Adviser provides financial planning solutions and technology to over half of the UK’s financial advisers, enabling them to create value for their businesses and clients.
• ii, the UK’s second-largest direct-to-consumer investment platform, helps over 430,000 individual customers to plan, save and invest in the way that works best for them.

About the Department

The Adviser business supports financial advisers across the UK by providing expertise, technology, and tools that help them thrive. Our ambition is to be the easiest partner for advisers to work with, enabling them to grow their businesses and support their clients effectively.

We operate a product-centric model where teams are empowered, autonomous, and accountable. We focus on delivering impactful, user-centred digital products and services that help advisory businesses excel and delight their clients.

About the Role

As Head of Engineering, you will lead and shape the engineering function for the Adviser business, building a multidisciplinary team to deliver robust, scalable, and innovative digital products. At an exciting stage of developing a greenfield architecture leveraging emerging technologies, you will play a key role in designing and implementing the future of Financial Advice technology.

Collaborating closely with the CPTO, Product, and Design teams, you will ensure products are resilient, high-performing, and aligned with user and business needs. Your responsibilities include defining the engineering strategy, managing end-to-end processes, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and learning.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategy and Vision: Define and implement the engineering strategy, balancing innovation with scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Engineering Management: Oversee the entire development process, from concept to deployment, ensuring high standards and alignment with user needs.
• Product Development: Integrate user feedback, analytics, and best practices to deliver robust and user-friendly solutions.
• Team Leadership: Recruit, mentor, and develop a high-performing engineering team, fostering a culture of growth and learning.
• Collaboration: Partner with CPTO leadership, Product, and Design teams to embed engineering into the product lifecycle.
• Standards and Best Practices: Define and uphold engineering standards, guidelines, and best practices across the team.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Act as the primary contact for engineering discussions, clearly communicating insights and progress to stakeholders.
• Risk Management: Proactively identify and mitigate engineering-related risks to ensure project success.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive innovation and adaptability within the team to remain competitive and meet evolving user and market needs.

About the Candidate

The ideal candidate will possess the following:

Experience

• Leadership experience in engineering teams within product-driven environments, with a proven ability to foster talent and build high-performing teams.
• Expertise in designing and implementing technical architecture and engineering processes that balance technical vision with business goals.

Skills and Knowledge

• Strategic thinking, with the ability to inspire a learning culture and raise the mindset and skills of engineers and colleagues.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, partnering effectively with Product, Design, and other stakeholders.
• Passion for integrating user feedback and analytics into the engineering process to deliver high-quality, user-focused solutions.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you have a disability and would like to apply to one of our UK roles under the Disability Confident Scheme, please notify us by completing the relevant section in our candidate questionnaire. One of our team will reach out to support you through your application process.

Our benefits

There\’s more to working life than coming home with a good salary. We have an environment where you can learn, get involved and be supported.

When you join us, your reward will be one of the best around. This includes 40 days’ annual leave, a 16% employer pension contribution, a discretionary performance based bonus (where applicable), private healthcare and a range of flexible benefits – including gym discounts, season ticket loans and access to an employee discount portal. You can read more about our benefits here.

Our business

Enabling our clients to be better investors drives everything we do. Our business is structured around three distinct areas – our vectors of growth – focused on our clients’ changing needs. You can find out more about what we do here.

An inclusive way of working

Whatever way you like to work, if you have the talent and commitment to join our team, we’d like to hear from you.

At abrdn we’ve adopted a ‘blended working’ approach. This approach combines the benefits of face-to-face collaboration, coaching and connecting in our offices with the flexibility of working from home. It enables colleagues to find a balance that works for their roles, their teams, our clients and our business.

An inclusive culture, where diverse perspectives drive our actions, is at the core of who we are and what we do. If you need assistance with your application, or a reasonable adjustment to your interview arrangements – for example, because you are neurodivergent, or have a physical, sensory, cognitive, mental, visible or invisible disability – please let us know and we’ll be happy to help.