Head of Development, Digital Delivery in Cardiff

Successful candidates may be based in any of our office locations – Cardiff, Glasgow or London. We especially welcome applicants from Cardiff and Glasgow.

Great technology starts with great leadership, and at Ofgem, we’re looking for a people‑first Head of Development to deliver development practice across our digital portfolio. Ofgem is Great Britain’s independent energy regulator. We’re at the forefront of change across the sector, driving toward Net Zero whilst protecting consumers, especially vulnerable people. We’re offering a permanent opportunity within our Digital Delivery portfolio, where you’ll be the vital piece of the digital puzzle that brings together our development teams and our digital stack.

You’ll be leading a team of exceptional Technical Leads who oversee around 45 development staff, and ensuring the digital culture is focused on innovation, collaboration and high‑quality delivery. This is a chance to influence our digital teams from the inside, improving engineering standards and delivery approaches, supporting the use of new tech, tools and AI, and creating an environment where everyone feels empowered to deliver their best work.

The key focus of the role is people, not technical prowess, so you’ll be building trust and psychological safety, having honest, constructive conversations that improve performance and drive standards, and solving problems and making decisions in ambiguous situations. You’ll bring significant leadership experience leading software development teams through other technical leaders, with a strong track record of coaching, performance management and building high‑performing, supportive cultures.

Alongside experience of driving technology adoption and change and delivering engineering standards, you’ll have credibility, judgement and exceptional communication skills with the ability to engage confidently at all levels and with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders. In return, you’ll have the opportunity to shape a supportive and high‑performing development environment within a major national organisation undergoing significant digital evolution. You’ll play a central role in building capability across the practice, supporting technical leaders and helping create a culture where people feel trusted, empowered and able to deliver their best work.

We have a critical purpose to drive the digital performance of the energy sector. Join us and help build the leadership, culture and development capability that will enable Ofgem to deliver on that mission.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, develop and inspire: Provide clear direction, coaching and performance management for 6–8 Technical Leads and creating strong career pathways for developers across the portfolio.
• Enhance engineering standards and ways of working: (e.g., SDLC, coding standards, branching/release strategy, security and quality gates), ensuring consistent delivery across multiple teams and suppliers.
• Provide leadership across the portfolio SLT: Influencing investment decisions, and ensuring development capability aligns to scheme priorities and wider organisational objectives.
• Operational planning: Understand team strengths and gaps, allocate resources to projects, support prioritisation/scheduling, and manage dependencies across products and delivery streams.
• Supporting supplier relationship management: Contributing to contract management, assuring quality of partner delivery, and embedding agreed standards and governance.
• Drive continuous improvement through actionable metrics and feedback loops (e.g., DORA, defect trends, lead time, deployment frequency, service health), using insight to remove bottlenecks and raise performance.
• Support effective delivery governance by working closely with Product, Delivery, Architecture, Security and Service Management teams to manage risk, assure outcomes, and communicate progress and issues clearly to senior non‑technical stakeholders.
• Lead the strategic adoption of AI‑enabled engineering: Working closely with our Innovation lead to define where AI tooling adds value, establish safe/approved usage patterns, upskill teams, and evolve ways of working to improve developer productivity and quality (e.g., assisted coding, test generation, documentation, code review support).
• Build and sustain a healthy engineering culture that supports inclusion, wellbeing, knowledge sharing and high performance, including contributing to hiring, onboarding, and succession planning for critical roles.

What you will NOT be responsible for

• Being the day‑to‑day individual contributor for coding, feature delivery, or fixing production issues (you will support teams to resolve issues, but delivery is owned by the relevant product teams and technical leads).
• Owning all low‑level solution design decisions for every product (you will set direction and assure standards while empowering Technical Leads and teams to design and implement solutions).
• Line managing every developer in the portfolio (you will line manage Technical Leads and lead the practice through them, providing matrix leadership and community support to delivery teams).

Key Outputs and Deliverables

• A clear, communicated development practice strategy and operating model, including standards, governance and ways of working.
• Improved consistency and quality across teams evidenced by measurable engineering metrics (e.g., lead time, deployment frequency, defect escape rate, incident trends, velocity, burndown).
• A high‑performing leadership layer across development, with strong Technical Leads, clear expectations, effective 1:1s, feedback, performance management and development plans.
• Effective resource planning and allocation across priority schemes and products, with transparent capacity, skills coverage, and mitigation plans for gaps.
• An agreed AI‑enabled engineering roadmap (tools, guardrails, training, and adoption measures) that demonstrably improves developer experience, productivity, and quality.
• Trusted relationships with senior stakeholders, with clear, timely communication of delivery health, risks, and trade‑offs, and evidence of issues being addressed at pace.
• Significant people leadership experience, leading software development teams through other leaders (e.g., Engineering Managers/Tech Leads), with a strong track record of coaching, performance management and building high‑performing, supportive cultures.
• Evidence of driving technology change and adoption (for example, introducing new tooling, automation or AI‑assisted engineering practices) with appropriate governance, learning and measurable benefits.
• Proven ability to set and embed engineering standards and improve consistency across multiple teams (including quality, security, testing and release practices).
• Demonstrable experience of operational leadership in a technology function, including prioritisation, capacity/resource planning, dependency management and working across multi‑disciplinary teams.
• Experience working with partners/suppliers (e.g., co‑sourcing, consultancies) and contributing to contract and performance management to assure quality outcomes.