Head of Delivery in Cardiff

Location: Cardiff

At Hodge, we put people at the heart of our business and that means our customers, colleagues and communities. Hodge is a Welsh financial service provider that focuses on real estate finance and specialist residential mortgage markets.

The Head of Delivery is responsible for leading the end‐to‐end delivery of technology change across the bank, ensuring that product‐focused agile squads consistently deliver high‐quality, compliant, secure, and customer‐centric outcomes. The role oversees multiple integrated Scrum/Agile squads—typically comprising Business Analysts, Developers, Test Engineers, and DevOps specialists—and partners closely with Product Owners, Technology Leads, Programme Managers, and business stakeholders to ensure the effective flow of value across the bank’s regulated product and service landscape.

This position requires strong leadership in agile delivery, operational excellence, and regulatory awareness, ensuring that delivery practices meet strict banking compliance requirements while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. The Head of Delivery drives strategic alignment, resource optimisation, risk management, quality assurance, and squad capability development.

• Extensive leadership experience in technology delivery, portfolio management, or agile programme management within financial services or other highly regulated sectors.
• Proven track record of leading multi‐disciplinary agile delivery teams and implementing agile transformation at scale.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, cloud platforms, modern engineering practices, and automation pipelines common in digital banking environments.
• Strong analytical, strategic, and organisational skills; capable of resolving complex delivery challenges and prioritising under pressure.
• Demonstrated ability to manage senior stakeholders, including product leaders, risk partners, operational leaders, and technology executives.
• Strong coaching capabilities, with experience developing delivery maturity and agile capability across organisations.
• Deep understanding of regulatory frameworks affecting banks (e.g., operational resilience, KYC/AML, payments regulation, audit controls).
• Experience ensuring delivery outcomes meet stringent compliance, governance, and audit requirements typical of financial institutions.

• Own and implement the bank’s delivery strategy, ensuring alignment with business goals, regulatory expectations, and product roadmaps.
• Champion Agile and Lean practices across all technology squads, driving consistent delivery methodologies and coaching senior stakeholders in agile ways of working.
• Define governance frameworks that ensure transparency, risk awareness, regulatory compliance, and traceability across all change initiatives.
• Lead cross‐functional delivery squads (BA, Dev, Test, DevOps), ensuring teams have clear goals, delivery discipline, and strong engineering practices.
• Partner with Technology Leads overseeing core technical capabilities (e.g., platforms, data, digital channels), ensuring architectural alignment and technical excellence.
• Build delivery capability by recruiting, mentoring, and developing high‐performing team members, in line with workforce development expectations from similar senior roles.
• Work with Programme Managers and Product Owners to create value streams that optimise flow from concept to delivery – balancing regulatory priorities, customer value, and operational feasibility.
• Ensure prioritisation mechanisms reflect risk, compliance needs, and business value in a regulated environment, mirroring best practice from financial services delivery roles.
• Maintain oversight of the delivery pipeline to ensure efficient sequencing, minimal bottlenecks, and high throughput.
• Implement robust delivery controls aligned to financial‐services regulatory requirements (e.g., operational resilience, conduct, change risk, audit readiness).
• Identify, escalate, and mitigate risks, coordinating across technical and business functions similar to banking delivery leadership roles.
• Oversee quality assurance processes to ensure high standards of engineering, test coverage, and regulatory compliance for technology change.
• Act as the senior liaison between technology delivery, product leadership, compliance, risk, and operational teams.
• Facilitate effective communication across squads, steering groups, risk committees, and programme governance forums.
• Drive cross‐department collaboration to ensure delivery outcomes meet internal and external regulatory expectations.
• Establish and monitor KPIs, delivery metrics, and flow indicators to measure team productivity, delivery predictability, and customer value.
• Champion continuous improvement initiatives, including retrospectives, process optimisation, and tooling enhancements, consistent with agile delivery excellence roles.
• Use data‐driven insights to adjust resource allocation, backlog priorities, and delivery processes.

Please be aware that should we pursue your application, all our Financial Services employees will be expected to complete background checks to assess suitability for employment, these include; a criminal record, identity, media, sanctions, adverse finance, fraud prevention and reference checks to comply with our regulatory requirements.

Hodge is an advocate of being an equal opportunities employer. We believe in promoting equality and diversity which is central to our lives today. We welcome applications from all sections of the community and recognise the value a diverse workforce brings to an organisation.

ESG and sustainability are at the heart of everything we do and serve as a reminder of the responsibility we have to our stakeholders, customers, colleagues, and the communities we operate in to use our position wisely. We’re currently exploring different certifications available and have done an initial review of how we think we’d fare, as we see this as a real opportunity for Hodge given our social purpose.

Apply today to become part of Hodge’s mission to make life better for customers and society in the moments that matter.