Head of Engineering (full-time) in Moffat

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions.

The Opportunity: Come join our engineering organisation to build the discipline that lets AI coding agents do reliable work at scale. As agents take on more of the software lifecycle, the hard part is no longer writing code - agents generate it faster than humans can review it, so the bottleneck shifts to verification and trust. Harness Engineering exists to break that bottleneck: engineering the environment that steers agents toward correct, maintainable, well-architected output so that quality is enforced by the system, not re-audited by a person on every change. We call that environment the harness (Agent = Model + Harness), and we're building a dedicated Harness Engineering team to own it. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will personally design and build harness components while leading and growing a regional team of harness engineers, and setting the quality bar for AI-assisted engineering across the organisation.

What You'll Contribute:

• Personally design, build, and evolve the harness - the guides, feedback loops, guardrails, and shared context that turn raw model capability into production-grade engineering.
• Build and maintain feedforward guides (agent instruction files, reusable skills, architectural rules, reference docs, and codemods) that help agents get it right the first time, and drive their adoption across teams.
• Own AI governance for your region: define authority boundaries for what agents may merge unaided, establish LLM testing infrastructure, and ensure AI-generated output meets quality, safety, and compliance thresholds before release.
• Define and own cross-organizational QA and quality-gating standards, ensuring consistent, enforceable engineering practices across teams and product areas.
• Decide where each control runs in the path to production - fast checks pre-commit, more expensive checks post-integration, and continuous sensors that scan for drift outside the change lifecycle - keeping quality as far left as is economical.
• Partner with stakeholders to attract talent, set goals, and measure and reward performance.
• Work closely with other engineering leaders and product management to turn specifications and acceptance criteria into enforceable controls, and to align the harness with platform and delivery roadmaps.
• Demonstrate expertise through internal enablement, presentations, and thought leadership on agent-augmented engineering.

What We're Seeking:

• Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related discipline, or relevant commercial experience in software architecture, design, development, and testing.
• Strong software engineering background with experience in large, complex codebases, and genuine care for architecture, testing, and maintainability - you remain hands-on.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g. Experience building engineering tooling across a modern stack - linters and static analysis, CI/CD pipelines, containerized build/test environments, and instrumentation/observability - plus familiarity with agent instruction conventions such as AGENTS.md).
• Experience with spec-driven development, context engineering, agent orchestration, fitness functions, and developer-platform work.
• A systems mindset - you'd rather fix the environment than fix one output - and the ability to encode 'what good looks like' into mechanical, repeatable rules.
• Demonstrated experience owning AI governance and cross-organisational quality standards, including establishing LLM testing infrastructure and quality gating for AI-generated artifacts.
• Strong experience managing geographically distributed, high-performing engineering teams, including navigating the organisational change that AI adoption brings.

Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so. An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.

At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics. You'll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.

FICO makes a real difference in the way businesses operate worldwide:

• Fraud Detection and Security — 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.
• Lending — 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.

Global trends toward digital transformation have created tremendous demand for FICO's solutions, placing us among the world's top 100 software companies by revenue. We help many of the world's largest banks, insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers and other firms reach a new level of success. Join FICO and help change the way business thinks!

FICO promotes a culture of inclusion and seeks to attract a diverse set of candidates for each job opportunity. We are an equal employment opportunity employer and we're proud to offer employment and advancement opportunities to all candidates without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Research has shown that women and candidates from underrepresented communities may not apply for an opportunity if they don't meet all stated qualifications. Information submitted with your application is subject to the FICO Privacy policy.

Location: Work from Home, United Kingdom

Type: Full time