Director of Engineering in Cardiff

Salary: HG 20 £99,289 - £124,111, negotiable depending on experience

Job Type: Full-Time, Permanent

Location: Cardiff, UK

Hybrid working: 2 days in office

About The IB

The International Baccalaureate provides world‑class educational services to over 6,000 schools across 160 countries. A career with the IB is not just a job; it’s an opportunity to work with an innovative world leader in education services where we empower our employees to thrive and make a difference.

About The Job

The Director of Product Engineering is a key leadership position responsible for defining and owning IB’s product engineering operating model across the Digital & Data Office (DDO) and helping drive sustained transformation from a project‑centric, vendor‑dependent delivery model to a product‑led, AI‑enabled engineering organisation. They oversee a team of approximately 100 engineers and delivery managers. This is a hands‑on transformation leadership role, requiring active engagement with engineering leaders, product partners, and executive stakeholders to drive measurable and sustainable change across IB’s digital ecosystem. Operating within a complex, mission‑driven, multi‑region environment, the role balances long‑term organisational capability with near‑term delivery outcomes. The role has end‑to‑end accountability for how digital products are engineered at scale, including engineering organisational design, delivery flow, capability development, and the effective use of AI within software development practices.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the transformation of IB’s engineering operating model, shifting from project‑based, vendor‑led delivery to a product‑led, AI‑enabled engineering organization.
• Own, manage and evolve IB’s product engineering operating model to ensure scalable, sustainable, and outcome‑focused delivery of digital products.
• Establish and maintain clear organisational structures, roles, responsibilities, and decision rights across engineering teams and delivery partners, ensuring consistency and alignment across regions and products.
• Partner closely with Product Management leadership to ensure alignment between product strategy, road maps, customer outcomes, and value realization, enabling coherent prioritisation, informed trade‑off decisions, effective risk management, and sustainable delivery of IB’s digital products at scale.
• Partner closely with the Director of IT to ensure alignment between product engineering, core platforms, infrastructure, security, and enterprise technology services, enabling coherent architectural decisions, effective risk management, and sustainable operation of IB’s digital products at scale.
• Manage performance of a significant technology estate.
• Provide leadership and accountability for improving end‑to‑end flow from strategic intent through to delivered impact, reducing systemic friction and dependency bottlenecks.
• Set expectations and standards for the use of outcome‑oriented metrics that inform decision‑making, improve predictability, and accelerate time‑to‑value, while avoiding unnecessary process or reporting overhead.
• Build and sustain a strong engineering leadership and capability base by setting clear expectations for engineering managers and senior individual contributors.
• Define career paths, progression standards and capability requirements that support long‑term organisational health, talent retention and succession.
• Partner with Talent and senior stakeholders to shape hiring strategies aligned to modern, AI‑enabled engineering practices.
• Lead the systematic integration of AI into engineering practices to improve productivity, quality and decision‑making across the product engineering lifecycle.
• Promote automation and software leverage as primary means of scale, exercising judgement on where AI adds value and where it does not.
• Commercial accountability and financial stewardship over product engineering budget.

Qualifications

• Extensive senior leadership experience with accountability for product engineering or technology functions operating at enterprise scale within large, complex organisations or high‑growth environments.
• Proven track record of leading organisation‑wide transitions from project‑based delivery models to product‑centric operating models, shaping enterprise strategy, influencing executive decision‑making and delivering sustained organisational change.
• Deep professional expertise in modern software engineering at scale, including cloud platforms, APIs, data‑intensive systems and contemporary engineering and delivery practices.
• Demonstrated experience embedding AI into engineering environments at scale, exercising sound judgement on value realisation, limitations and associated technical, ethical and organisational risk.
• Proven ability to lead sustained transformation in complex, constrained environments, exercising independent judgement, influencing senior stakeholders and operating credibly at executive and board‑adjacent level.
• Proven capability to build, lead and develop high‑performing engineering leadership teams, establishing a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement aligned to enterprise outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience managing significant technology budgets, exercising strong financial stewardship to optimise investment decisions, improve return on investment and balance short‑term delivery pressures with long‑term sustainability and risk management.

Benefits

• Annual salary in the region of £99,289 - £124,111, negotiable dependent on experience.
• Flexible benefits allowance equivalent to 1.5% of Annual Salary to spend on benefits or as addition to salary.
• 10% employer pension contribution with a 3% employee contribution.
• Enhanced family friendly benefits.
• 30 Days annual leave, plus public holidays.
• Life assurance 4x annual salary.
• Flexible working hours (core hours are 10am‑12pm and 2pm‑3pm), 37.5 hours per week.
• Paid volunteering leave.
• Excellent continuous professional development.

Opportunity & Belonging

We are committed to building a working environment that values respect, diversity and compassion. The International Baccalaureate is proud to be an equal opportunities employer, and we welcome applications from all qualified applicants. As a global employer, we adhere to all relevant employment legislation in the countries in which we operate, and we’re happy to provide any reasonable support or adjustments as needed to ensure applicants can fully participate in our recruitment process.