VP Engineering in London

Overview

Our perks:

• 25 days holiday (rising to 28 after 3 years' service) plus bank holidays.
• Private Medical - via vitality, with reward schemes paid for you and your family.
• Health cash plan - via Simply Health for employees and children claiming money back for dental, optical, etc.
• Pension – Oodle will contribute 5% of your salary into your pension pot.
• Life Assurance - 4 x annual salary - benefit funded by Oodle.
• Free breakfast, drinks and fruit in the office.
• Employee discounts – discounts for all major shops.
• 1 day volunteer day per year.
• Mental health care – 6 free counselling sessions via our EAP (Employee Assistance Programme).
• Paid sick leave – enhanced company sick pay.
• Enhanced family leave for primary and secondary caregivers.

Oodle – who are we

Our mission is to empower our customers by delivering simple experiences, straightforward lending products, and compassionate support, from application to final payment – and beyond. We finance cars, but more importantly, we finance people. Since 2016, we’ve supported tens of thousands of customers on their car buying journey.

As an employer, your career is important to us. We’re committed to creating an environment where you can thrive as yourself. We celebrate diversity and inclusion, actively working to make sure every team member feels supported on their journey with us. Our Talent Development team is here to support your growth, providing opportunities for learning, development, and career progression.

The Role & Team

We’re looking for a VP Engineering to stabilise and transform our Engineering organisation (~45 engineers). This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can stabilise delivery, inspire engineering teams to raise standards, and embed clear ownership and accountability, while also leading technical modernisation. Reporting to the CPTO, you will act as the senior technical leader and will own Engineering performance, culture, delivery and commercial effectiveness.

This is not a scale-by-hiring role. Success will come through capability uplift, stronger leadership, clearer ways of working and smarter operating models.

What You’ll Do:

• Stabilising delivery and reducing operational noise, with clear ownership, cadence and accountability across Engineering.
• Resetting Engineering culture, quality standards and leadership capability.
• Owning the Engineering cost base and improving efficiency, clearly articulating how Engineering creates business value.
• Partnering Product on prioritisation and Finance to build investment cases for platforms, tooling, technical debt and operating model changes.
• Designing and implementing a fit-for-purpose Target Operating Model, including introducing offshore capability where it improves economics and output.
• Improving release reliability, testing maturity and incident management while reducing technical debt and modernising core platforms.
• Increasing engineering productivity through better tooling, automation and developer experience.
• Acting as senior technical lead, ensuring architectural decisions are commercially grounded and aligned to business priorities.

Who you are:

• Led engineering organisations of ~40–60 people in turnaround or transformation environments.
• Strong technical credibility across architecture, delivery and quality practices.
• Demonstrated ability to improve engineering effectiveness without relying on headcount growth.
• Experience owning engineering costs and building business cases for investment.
• A track record of operating model design (including offshore / nearshore).
• Ability to understand engineering economics, trade-offs and ROI.
• Comfortable making tough performance and prioritisation decisions.
• Ability to influence C-Suite Stakeholders.

Hiring Process:

• Preliminary Interview (30 mins)
• Face to Face Interview
• Final Round (in office)

Our Values:

• Embrace being human – empathy and diversity make us stronger.
• Strive for awesome – it’s awesome when we do better every day.
• Everyone’s a builder – we’re in this together and we win as a team.
• Bravely honest – we’re honest with ourselves and everyone else.
• Think customer – they’re at the heart of everything we do.

Oodle is proud to be an inclusive workplace and we recognise diversity of experience, thoughts and backgrounds leads to better customer outcomes and an environment where our colleagues can thrive.