Engineering Enablement Lead

About us

At National Grid, our commitment to a cleaner, greener energy future is powered by the dedication and ingenuity of our people. Join our team as an Engineering Enablement Lead and be a part of something bigger - where your unique skills and passions can make a real difference. Together, we are superpowered.

This position is based in Warwick and operates under a hybrid working model. Hybrid work expectations are subject to business needs and company policy.

About the role

As Engineering Enablement Lead, you'll set the engineering system that our products and Platforms-owned platforms are built and run on. You'll own the standard, toolchains and paved roads that engineering teams use, and will be accountable for the quality, reliability and security of the way software is built in the Electric Distribution business. This is a standard-setting role with no direct reports: it leads through the wider engineering community and through framework partners engaged on specific initiatives, and its authority comes from credibility rather than reporting line.

What you'll do

• Engineering standards and paved roads: Own and publish the engineering playbook covering secure coding, branching, code review, dependency management and the paved-road templates teams start from. Define and maintain the reference CI/CD pipelines, with security, quality and compliance gates automated into them rather than applied manually.
• Quality engineering and test: Own the test strategy: the balance of unit, integration, contract and end-to-end testing, coverage expectations, and the quality gates that block a release. Own test data and test environment standards, and report defect escape rates and rework to leadership each quarter.
• Reliability and observability: Define the observability standard covering logging, metrics, distributed tracing and alerting, and the service level objectives every production service must publish. Embed site reliability engineering practice, including error budgets, on-call expectations and blameless post-incident review, and own the incident learning loop.
• Secure engineering: Own the secure engineering standard jointly with Cyber Security, covering secrets management, dependency and supply chain scanning, and vulnerability remediation timescales.
• Developer experience and toolchain: Own the engineering toolchain covering source control, pipelines, artefact management, test and observability tooling, including selection, cost, licensing and adoption. Measure developer experience and engineering flow using lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and time to restore, and publish improvement targets against them.
• Community leadership and partner initiatives: Lead the engineering practice through influence rather than line management, building commitment to the standard across the wider engineering community. Build and sustain the wider engineering community across product and platform teams - guilds, practice forums and internal engineering events - as the primary route by which the standard is adopted. Run the engineering community of practice, own the engineering career pathway and hiring standard, and act as technical conscience for engineering hires across the function. Direct framework partners engaged on specific engineering initiatives: define the outcome, the standard they must work to, the acceptance criteria, and the handover back into the community. Partner with the Product Management, Solution Architecture and Delivery Orchestration Leads so that the four practice standards form one coherent operating model.

About you

• Extensive software engineering leadership experience in a complex, technology-enabled organisation, with credibility among practising engineers.
• Deep practical knowledge of DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code and secure engineering practice at scale.
• Proven track record of defining and embedding engineering standards, paved roads and playbooks across multiple teams.
• Strong background in quality engineering and test strategy, including test automation, test data and environment management.
• Experience of embedding site reliability engineering practice, including service level objectives, error budgets and observability.
• Experience of selecting, governing and driving adoption of engineering toolchains, including the cost and licensing position.
• Working knowledge of Azure cloud-native application platforms, microservices, event-driven architectures and serverless workloads.
• Experience of measuring and improving developer experience and engineering flow using evidence rather than assertion.
• Ability to successfully operate at a senior manager level, forming strong relationships and engagement as needed across all levels of the Business Entity.
• Experience of working within a heavily matrixed organisation, including delivery through system integrators and managed service partners.

What you'll get

• Competitive Salary, based on capability and experience.
• Bonus of up to 30% based on personal and company performance.
• Additional benefits include a competitive contributory pension scheme where we will double match your contribution to a maximum company contribution of 12%, flexible benefits such as a cycle scheme, share incentive plan, technology schemes, access to apps such as digital GP service for round the clock access to GP video consultations and NHS repeat prescriptions, wellbeing app to support your health and fitness, and access to Work + Family Space, providing support and resources for work and family life, including paid emergency childcare and eldercare.

More Information

The closing date for this vacancy is 20th November. However, we encourage candidates to submit their applications as early as possible and not to wait until the published closing date. National Grid’s recruitment periods can and may vary. We reserve the right to remove this advert or close it to further applications at any point during the recruitment process.

We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for all. We welcome applications from all suitably qualified candidates - we make appointments purely on merit, assessed against objective selection criteria. We support flexible working and will make reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process should you have any physical or mental impairment which may affect your ability to participate in the process. Please note that in most cases, National Grid is unable to offer sponsorship for employment under the UK points-based immigration system. As such, applicants must have the legal right to work in the UK without requiring sponsorship now or in the future under the UK points-based immigration system. However, in exceptional circumstances where there is a clear and demonstrable need for specialist skills that cannot be sourced from the local labour market, National Grid may consider offering sponsorship. All applications are welcome from candidates who meet these requirements, regardless of race, nationality, or ethnic origin.