Head of Engineering in London

About the Business

Quilter plc is a leading wealth management business, helping to enable brighter financial futures for every generation. Quilter oversees £141.9 billion in customer investments (as of March 2026). It has an adviser and customer offering spanning financial advice, investment platforms, multi-asset investment solutions, and discretionary fund management. The business is comprised of two segments: Affluent and High Net Worth.

Affluent encompasses the financial planning business, Quilter Financial Planning, the Quilter Investment Platform and Quilter Investors, the multi-asset investment solutions business. High Net Worth includes the discretionary fund management business, Quilter Cheviot, together with Quilter Cheviot Financial Planning – offering a highly personalised service to private clients, charities, trustees, and professional partners. Quilter Cheviot has presence throughout the UK, Ireland and Channel Islands.

At Quilter we never stand still. Our foundations are rooted in our extraordinary expertise, which is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers, but we have great ambitions to stay one step ahead and make an even greater difference to the people and communities we serve, including our colleagues. Our business is transforming, continually modernising, and becoming even more customer centric. So, if you want to be bold in the pursuit of your ambitions, bring new ideas, and challenge and evolve what we do, it’s the perfect time to join us!

About the Role

As the Head of Engineering, you will be the enterprise owner of the engineering capability. The role is accountable for ensuring that the organisation’s technology platforms, regardless of buy or built are delivered to a consistently high engineering standard that is defined and governed within the engineering practice. You will report to the CTDO and act as a senior technology partner to business, product, change, architecture, infrastructure, information security, data, operations and third-party delivery partners. The role requires strong functional and technical leadership, and stakeholder influence across a regulated environment.

The role is required to build the quality engineering practice, DevSecOps enablement, engineering standards, tooling, career frameworks and the safe adoption of AI-assisted software delivery.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the engineering strategy aligned to business, technology and product priorities.
• Establish the engineering operating model, including team structures, accountabilities, ways of working and decision rights aligned with the broader ways of working for Quilter.
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering teams and ensure appropriate engineering governance that is light touch and ensures execution at pace is not compromised.
• Maintain awareness of emerging technology and engineering trends and translate to meaningful and purposeful conversations and initiatives that drive business value.
• Build and lead a high-performing Engineering organisation, creating a culture of technical excellence, accountability, innovation, continuous improvement and customer focus.
• Define and evolve Quilter's engineering strategy, ensuring engineering investments, capabilities and practices support business priorities, customer outcomes and long-term technology goals.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering standards covering software design, coding, quality engineering, integration, deployment and production stability.
• Lead the evolution of engineering enablement capabilities, including platform engineering, developer tooling, automation and self-service engineering services, reducing friction and improving the effectiveness of software delivery teams.
• Continuously improve developer experience (DevEx) by providing engineers with the tools, environments, processes and support required to build, test, deploy and operate software efficiently and safely.
• Use DORA or complimentary engineering metrics to understand delivery performance and engineering productivity.
• Establish and evolve the platform engineering capability that enables engineering teams to build, test, deploy and operate software through self service or SDK (self development kit).
• Partner with Enterprise and Solution Architecture to ensure engineering decisions support the organisation’s target architecture by attending ARB and ensuring that architectural decisions are cascaded to the engineering communities.
• Promote modular, API and event driven architectures.
• Drive the evolution of Quality Engineering, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle through automation, performance engineering, test data management, production feedback loops and shared accountability for quality outcomes.
• Establish quality gates and automated controls throughout the software development life cycle.
• Define and lead the organisation’s strategy for AI assisted software engineering. Enable engineers to safely use AI coding assistants. Establish appropriate governance for AI generated code.
• Develop engineering practices that move teams from AI coding assistants towards effective human + AI workflows.
• Drive modern software engineering practices by owning and continuously enhance DevSecOps capabilities, including CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as a code, API first development and secure software development.
• Build a culture of small, frequent, safe releases rather than large, high risk release deployments.
• Embed security throughout the engineering lifecycle, implement automated security controls within CI/CD pipelines including code scanning and vulnerability management. Establish secure coding practices and engineering security standards. Work with the cyber security team to implement security policies and practices.
• Establish clear engineering accountability with you build it you run concept.
• Balance internal and external delivery capabilities, ensuring the organisation has the right mix of skills, capacity, succession planning and commercial oversight to meet evolving business demand.
• Lead the engineering profession across Quilter, including engineering communities, career frameworks, capability development, technical leadership, coaching and succession planning.
• Manage technology, delivery and operational risks through proportionate governance, assurance and evidence-based decision-making, enabling teams to deliver at pace while maintaining appropriate controls.
• Act as a senior technology leader and trusted adviser, translating complex engineering challenges into clear business implications, options and recommendations for senior stakeholders.
• Lead organisational and engineering change in a pragmatic and outcome-focused manner, helping teams adopt modern engineering practices and deliver fast, secure and sustainable customer and business outcomes.
• Mature the engineering function by building out the engineering skill sets aligned to the technology strategy and strategic skill sets required to execute on the organisation’s ambition.
• Provide engineering oversight of strategic technology partners and vendors that provide outsourced engineering capabilities.
• Create a culture of innovation and curiosity within the engineering community by driving hackathons, system thinking and engineering mindset.

About You

You are an experienced engineering leader with a track record of building high-performing teams and delivering technology at scale. Comfortable operating in complex, regulated environments, you combine strong technical expertise with commercial awareness and the ability to influence at senior levels.

You will bring:

• Experience leading large engineering organisations through growth, transformation and change.
• Experience introducing AI-assisted engineering practices, including coding assistants, automation and AI-enabled software delivery.
• Strong understanding of quality engineering, test automation and building quality into the software lifecycle.
• A proven ability to build high-performing teams and cultures focused on excellence, accountability and continuous improvement.
• Strong experience aligning engineering outcomes to business strategy, customer needs and organisational priorities.
• Deep knowledge of modern engineering practices, including Agile, DevSecOps, cloud technologies, automation, CI/CD and secure software development.
• Experience improving developer productivity through platform engineering, developer tooling and self-service capabilities.
• A passion for Developer Experience (DevEx) and creating environments where engineers can thrive.
• Commercially focused decision-making, balancing innovation, delivery, risk, technical debt and long-term sustainability.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence and communicate effectively at Executive level.
• The ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business outcomes and recommendations.
• A collaborative leadership style with a passion for coaching, developing talent and building future capability.
• Experience leading organisational change and embedding modern ways of working.
• Experience with Microsoft technologies, including Azure, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Power Platform and Dynamics 365, would be advantageous.

Inclusion & Diversity

We value diversity and strive to promote inclusivity in all aspects of our culture. We believe in equal opportunities for all, ensuring that no applicant encounters less favourable treatment based on anything but their skills, qualifications, experience, and potential. We celebrate the unique contributions of a diverse workforce and create a respectful, nurturing environment where every colleague can thrive.

Values

• Do the right thing: We act with integrity and are proudly committed to going above and beyond in service of our clients and the support we provide our communities.
• Always curious: We continuously seek new ideas and knowledge so we’re one step ahead of our clients’ needs. We look for inspiration everywhere and encourage experimentation, recognising that this is how we create brilliant solutions for brighter futures.
• Embrace challenge: We aim high to transform our potential into meaningful outcomes. With ambition as our driving force and a steadfast commitment to growth, we succeed for the good of every generation.
• Stronger together: Combining our diverse talents, we accomplish more collectively than we ever could do alone. We speak openly, actively listen, and support each other, and constructively challenge and embrace new ideas. We seek empowerment and demonstrate ownership and trust, with the confidence to make impactful decisions.

Core Benefits

• Holiday: 182 hours (26 days)
• Quilter Incentive Scheme: All employees are eligible to participate in incentive scheme, to incentivise business performance and their contribution.
• Pension Scheme: A non-contributory company pension scheme that can be boosted through personal contributions.
• Private Medical Insurance: Single cover as standard with options to increase cover to include your partner or children.
• Life Assurance: 4x your salary.
• Income Protection: 75% of salary, less state benefits, payable after 26 weeks of absence.
• Healthcare Cash Plan: Jersey employees only.
• In addition to our core benefits, we offer a range of flexible benefits to UK employees that you can choose from and pay for conveniently via a salary deduction.