Vice President of Software (AI) in Belfast

Lead an engineering organisation of around 100 engineers through a layer of six Engineering Directors. Drive a bold AI-assisted engineering agenda across a heavily .NET (with broader polyglot) estate. Remote across the UK and Ireland. Base salary up to £175k, bonus up to 13% and a strong benefits package. Player-coach role with a direct line into the EVP of Technology and real authority to reshape the function.

About the Company: Our client is a high-growth fintech operating in the global payments space, delivering a merchant-first platform that powers everyday commerce across multiple markets. They run engineering at significant scale, with a sizeable, polyglot product portfolio and a culture built around small, empowered teams. They are positioning themselves to take share from the incumbents on capability and price, with AI-assisted engineering as the lever, and they are looking for a senior leader who relishes that fight.

The Role: This is a Vice President of Engineering position, reporting directly to the EVP of Technology and accountable for a software organisation of around 100 engineers led through a layer of approximately six Engineering Directors. You will operate as a player-coach, building the leadership team, holding the bar on technical direction, and shaping the way the wider technology function delivers software. The brief is genuinely strategic; you will define team topologies, set the multi-quarter engineering strategy, and lead an aggressive shift to AI-assisted and agentic delivery that compresses time to value across the product portfolio. This role will suit a senior engineering leader who is credible in the code, decisive in the room, and energised by reshaping how a sizeable team builds and ships in an AI-first world.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead an organisation of around 100 engineers through a layer of approximately six Engineering Directors, owning hiring, performance, succession and culture.
• Define team topologies and hire to them, calibrating assessments and setting the technical and cultural bar across the function.
• Set the multi-quarter engineering strategy and architectural direction in partnership with the Technology Leadership team.
• Own delivery against the product roadmap, holding engineering OKRs and tracking deployment frequency, change failure rate and mean time to recovery as first-class metrics.
• Champion modern engineering practice, including CI/CD, trunk-based development, automated testing and observability, ensuring teams ship to production daily.
• Drive an ambitious AI-assisted and agentic engineering agenda, embedding tools like Claude across the SDLC and setting the bar for how AI raises quality and accelerates delivery.
• Partner with the VPs of DevOps, Technical Operations, Information Security, Database Administration and Product to resolve dependencies and align on shared outcomes.
• Maintain technical credibility by contributing to architectural decisions, quality standards and incident response across the polyglot stack.
• Build a culture of accountability, psychological safety and continuous improvement, acting early on signals of disengagement or burnout.
• Drive systemic improvements to how the organisation builds and ships software, using delivery data to make the case and following through on execution.

What You'll Need:

Essential:

• 8+ years of experience leading software engineering organisations.
• 3+ years as a Vice President of Engineering (or above), with a sphere of influence of 100+ engineers.
• Proven track record as a manager of managers, comfortable leading through a layer of Directors and senior engineering leaders.
• Strong technical breadth across modern service ecosystems; the underlying estate is heavily .NET (C#) so working familiarity is welcome, but overall leadership calibre and technical depth matter more than primary language.
• Experience operating in environments where shipping working software to production happens daily, with the CI/CD, trunk-based development, automated testing and observability practices that make that cadence safe.
• Fluency across delivery methodologies (Lean, Kanban, Scrum, XP) and team topologies (stream-aligned, platform, enabling, complicated-subsystem), with the judgement to choose the right shape for the work.
• Hands-on adopter of AI-assisted and agentic software development, with conviction that AI will substantially reshape how engineering teams build and ship, and the appetite to lead that change.
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable engaging with executive stakeholders and leading distributed teams.
• Competitive instinct; energised by going after the incumbents in payments rather than running alongside them.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Eligible to live and work in the UK or Ireland.

Nice to have:

• Experience in payments, fintech or another regulated, high-scale domain.
• Direct experience driving an organisational shift to a more agile or AI-assisted delivery model.

Why Apply?

• Base salary up to £175k, bonus up to 13% of base and a strong benefits package.
• Remote across the UK and Ireland, with the trust to work from wherever you do your best thinking.
• Sphere of influence over a 100+ engineer organisation through six Directors, with the mandate and budget to reshape it.
• Direct reporting line into the EVP of Technology, with a real seat at the leadership table.
• A high-trust culture built around small teams, big outcomes and an outcomes-over-outputs ethos.
• Genuine commitment to AI-assisted engineering, with leadership backing to embed it across the SDLC.
• Backed by a business operating at scale in global payments, so the decisions you make land at meaningful volume.
• Opportunity to build a multi-year legacy as the engineering function steps up to its next phase of growth.

How to Apply: If you believe you meet the criteria for this role and are excited about the opportunity, please apply via the link. Alternatively, reach out to Phil Gamble directly for an informal chat via LinkedIn or WhatsApp.