Head of Engineering in Leeds

At Grant Thornton we do things differently - looking to the future, driving ambitious growth and pioneering positive change in our industry. Providing audit, tax and advisory services, we empower clients through strategic insight, curiosity, and genuine partnership. And we empower our people with real opportunity, an inclusive culture and work life balance.

Grant Thornton UK LLP is part of a global network of independent audit, tax and advisory firms, made up of some 58,000 people in over 135 countries. We’re a team of independent thinkers who put quality, inclusion and integrity first. All around the world we bring a different experience to our clients. A better experience. One that delivers the expertise they need in a way that goes beyond. Personal, proactive, and agile.

Every day our teams help people in businesses and communities to do what is right and achieve their goals. Grant Thornton is building a new digital team as part of the firm’s £500m multi‑year investment to transform how we work and deliver for clients. This investment is focused on redesigning our operating model around the way clients make decisions, using data, digital tools, and streamlined processes to remove friction, reduce duplication and provide faster, clearer insights. The new digital team will play a critical role in shaping and embedding these changes across the firm, developing tools, platforms, and digital capabilities that accelerate decision‑making, improve the client experience, and empower our people to work smarter.

Working at the heart of a major firm‑wide transformation, this team will help modernise core processes, support innovation, and ensure we deliver a more efficient, tech‑enabled, and future‑focused service for our clients. We’re happy to talk flexible working and consider reduced hours and job shares. We’ll support you to balance your work and life.

A look into the role

• Lead the evolution and scaling of the firm's software engineering capability.
• Own software engineering delivery, culture, and standards.
• Lead a high‑performing team that solves business problems efficiently, through native AI tooling where appropriate and through bespoke solutions where necessary, within the regulatory and security constraints of a professional services environment.
• Own engineering delivery, quality, and pace, ensuring that delivery is predictable, transparent, and aligned to business needs.
• Establish and embed standards, tooling, and ways of working that scale with the team.
• Use engineering health metrics to track progress and drive continuous improvement.
• Keep technical debt visible and managed, integrated into delivery planning and not allowed to constrain pace.
• Contribute to make/buy/integrate decisions with clear commercial rationale.
• Ensure engineering teams implement and adhere to the firm’s security and compliance standards, working closely with Information Security on vulnerability management and response.
• Lead the shift to an AI‑native software engineering culture, embedding the use of AI tooling as an integral part of the development lifecycle.
• Set the standards for how AI is used responsibly across engineering, both in the products that are built and the tools our engineers use.
• Own evaluation and governance of AI developer tooling, defining adoption policy, security criteria, and usage guardrails.
• Own platform engineering, covering CI/CD, developer tooling, environment management, and the application/infrastructure interface.
• Maintain architecture governance that preserves coherence across the platform while enabling team autonomy.
• Ensure the engineering stack is documented and maintainable as the team grows.
• Own the engineering relationship with other digital teams, governing API usage, dependencies, and integration patterns.

Knowing you’re right for us

Joining us as a Head of Engineering, the minimum criteria you’ll need is significant product management experience with a track record of strategic ownership, defining what to build and why rather than just managing delivery. End to end delivery of digital products in complex, multi‑stakeholder environments and proven ownership of AI or data products, including model behaviour, prompt iteration, evaluation design, and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.

It would be great if you had some of the following skills, but don’t worry if you don’t tick every box; we’ll help you develop along the way:

• Sufficient technical literacy to assess feasibility, challenge engineering estimates, and make informed build decisions in an API‑and‑platform‑driven environment.
• Commercial acumen to connect product decisions to business outcomes and contribute to investment cases.
• Excellent stakeholder management and the credibility to influence senior leaders without authority in a complex, multi‑stakeholder environment.
• Experience managing managers and individual contributors.
• Hands‑on exposure to AI/LLM engineering, including integration patterns, evaluation frameworks, or RAG pipeline design.
• Familiarity with Azure, Microsoft 365 and AI platform services in a production environment.
• Experience owning or contributing to an engineering career framework.
• Background in Developer Experience (DevEx) or platform engineering.

Knowing we’re right for you

Embracing uniqueness, the culture at Grant Thornton thrives on the contributions of all our people; we never settle for what is easy, we look beyond to deliver the right thing, for everyone. Building an inclusive culture, where we value difference and respect our colleagues helps our people to perform at the best of their ability and realise their potential. Our open and accessible culture means you’ll interact with leaders who are interested in you and everything you bring to our firm. The things that set you apart, we value them. That’s why we give you the freedom to bring your whole self to work and pursue your passions inside and outside of work.

Beyond the job

Life is more than work. The things you do, and the people you’re with outside of work matter, that’s why we’re happy to look at flexible working options for all our roles, and we’ll always do our best to keep your work and life in balance. The impact you can make here will go far beyond your day job. From secondments, to fundraising for local charities, or investing in entrepreneurs in the developing world, you’ll be giving back to society. It’s that drive to do the right thing that runs through our every move, grounded in our firm’s values – purposefully driven, actively curious and candid but kind. We’re looking for people who want to contribute, spark fresh ideas and go beyond expectations. People who want to be able to proudly do what’s right, for the firm, our clients, our people and themselves.