Director of engineering - Accounts in London

Seccl is the Octopus-owned embedded investment platform that is on a mission to help more people invest and invest well. We are B-Corp certified with product-market fit, early traction and potential to transform an outdated industry. We’ve been growing fast and will scale even faster in the coming years.

The role involves leading the long-term technical strategy, organisational design and engineering excellence for the Accounts domain, which is the foundation of every investor journey on Seccl. Responsibilities include:

• Providing collaborative leadership across architecture, risk, delivery and team growth in one of Seccl’s most business-critical and regulated domains.
• Reporting directly to the CTO and partnering closely with the Group Product Manager for Accounts in a dual-leadership model.
• Guiding the technical direction for 46 squads, ensuring scalable architecture, engineering quality and reliable delivery.
• Developing and enabling Engineering Managers, embedding a culture of Ownership and shared accountability through a build it, run it approach.
• Operating within a domain with deep regulatory responsibility, technical complexity and a broad product footprint spanning backend services, event-driven flows, APIs and customer-facing UI.

In 12-18 months, you’ll have:

• Delivered a clear multi-year Accounts technical roadmap aligned to product and compliance priorities.
• Improved DORA and reliability metrics, reducing operational risk.
• Strengthened the Engineering Manager, Staff and Principal engineering bench with clear succession depth.
• Scaled organisational design to sustain flow, autonomy and effective delivery as Seccl grows.

On a typical day you will:

• Set and communicate the technical vision and strategy for the Accounts tribe, shaping direction for the longer term ahead.
• Guide architectural decisions that ensure scalability, resilience and compliance.
• Work with Staff and Principal Engineers to define and evolve architectural guardrails, patterns and platform capabilities.
• Partner with the Group Product Manager to align technical and product priorities for maximum customer impact.
• Lead and coach Engineering Managers, enabling their growth and technical leadership.
• Advocate best practices and frameworks (e.g., AWS Well-Architected Framework) across squads.
• Ensure operational excellence and reliability in delivery, embedding a build it, run it culture.
• Design, refine and evolve the organisational structure of the Accounts tribe to ensure long-term flow, autonomy and Ownership.
• Build succession plans, strengthen leadership pipelines and uplift engineering management capability.
• Influence company-wide engineering standards, frameworks and technical strategy as part of the Engineering Leadership Team.
• Drive safe, measurable adoption of AI-assisted engineering with appropriate governance for IP, security and compliance.
• Promote continuous improvement in processes, tooling and engineering culture.
• Partner with Compliance, Risk, Security and Operations to embed robust engineering governance, technical controls and audit readiness.
• Shape and manage cloud spend, operational cost-to-serve and vendor relationships across the Accounts domain.

This role is for you if you:

• Have experience leading multiple engineering squads in a high-growth, cloud-native environment.
• Have experience leading 20-40+ engineers through managers, Staff engineers and senior individual contributors.
• Have owned multi-year technical and organisational strategies, ideally within regulated or high-integrity domains.
• Understand AWS/serverless architecture and modern engineering practices.
• Enjoy shaping operating models, delivery frameworks and engineering cultures.
• Can operate across horizons: from long-term architectural direction to diving into technical detail when needed.
• Build strong partnerships across product and engineering, influencing at all levels.
• Have a track record of improving delivery processes and driving operational efficiencies.
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and rapid growth, using data to guide decisions.

This role isn’t for you if you:

• You’ve never led engineering teams or scaled technical organisations.
• You lack experience in cloud-native architectures or modern engineering practices.
• You prefer highly prescriptive, top-down environments rather than autonomy.
• You find fast-changing or ambiguous environments challenging.

What’s in it for you:

We offer a generous mix of benefits for the things that really matter to our people, including a salary between £115,000 and £130,000 dependent on experience + reviewed annually, and 27 days holiday.