Head of Software Engineering

As Head of Software Engineering, reporting into the Delivery & Engagement Director, you will provide strategic leadership and accountability for the delivery of software engineering and test automation across the Travis Perkins Group.

You'll oversee a profession of over 40 permanent colleagues, alongside flexible contract and partner resources. In this role, you will provide financial leadership over local people and third party contract budgets totalling £5m-£7m, ensuring our wider engineering capacity aligns with business demand. You'll also play a key role in driving continuous improvement across software systems, development processes and enterprise wide transformation programmes.

What You'll Be Doing

• Engineering Leadership: Setting the strategy across all software engineering with regards to tooling, standards and ways of working to ensure cost effective, high quality outcomes.

Delivery & Collaboration: Making and fulfilling commitments to deliver value and change at pace while actively championing cross functional collaboration. * Service & Security: Driving technology objectives and security policies across the lifecycle, firmly embedding a modern DevSecOps mindset. * People Development: Leading, coaching and nurturing a large engineering team, developing a robust talent pipeline and building an inclusive, high performance culture. * Continuous Improvement: Utilising data driven KPIs, metrics and automation to evaluate and recommend new tools and practices that boost development efficiency. * Financial Management: Proactively managing direct and indirect budgets, identifying efficiency opportunities and aligning with Platforms for FinOps and cloud cost optimisation.

• Contracts & Partners: Proactively governing and managing third party suppliers, partners and vendors. Including all contractual elements of those relationships.
• Enterprise Leadership: Exerting wider influence outside your direct responsibility to help lead the overall Technology & Data function and build strong relationships with peers.

You'll be an experienced engineering leader who combines technical expertise with excellent commercial awareness, gravitas and stakeholder management skills., * Degree level qualification in Computer Science (or equivalent industry experience).

• Proven leadership experience managing people, large scale budgets (£3m+), and third-party vendor ecosystems.
• Proven track record of leading cultural transformation and technical legacy modernisation.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with an exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical executive stakeholders.
• Deep strategic understanding of software lifecycles, systems development, integration, test automation and modern DevSecOps practices.
• Resilient, empowering leadership style with a genuine commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)., * Experience operating successfully within a large, disparate enterprise, retail, construction or supply-chain heavy industry.
• Exposure to ERP implementations or large-scale digital transformation programmes.
• Familiarity with FinOps principles, advanced information security management frameworks, or emerging tech integration (such as AI/LLMs into the SDLC).
• Industry certifications across Agile/Prince2 methodologies, Service Management (ITIL) or Cloud Architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Specific domain knowledge of our tech stack (e.g., Rocket Universe, Oracle, Klipboard, Java, React.JS, Kafka)., If you're an ambitious engineering leader looking for a role that combines strategic influence, operational leadership and commercial impact, we'd love to hear from you.

Pulled from the full job description

• Employee discount
• Company pension, We know the right leader has options, so we have built a package designed to reward the impact you will make:
• Competitive base salary of plus an annual bonus linked to business performance
• Company car allowance
• Generous pension scheme with matched contributions (based on length of service)
• Save as you earn and share schemes that let you share in the Group's success.
• Colleague discount across Travis Perkins Group brands.
• Private medical cover
• Real career progression within one of the UK's largest merchant groups, with the visibility and scope that comes from a board level role in a high growth business., This is a highly visible leadership role with significant influence across the organisation. You'll have the opportunity to:
• Shape the overarching software engineering strategy for the UK's leading group in our sector.
• Lead, coach and develop the largest technology profession within the department.
• Drive meaningful operational improvement by implementing cutting-edge automation, DevEx principles, and modern tools.
• Contribute directly to critical enterprise transformation initiatives that enable our long-term business strategy.

Travis Perkins Group is now hiring for an exceptional Head of Software Engineering to join our senior technology leadership team and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our business. This is far more than a traditional engineering management role. You'll be a trusted advisor to directors, a leader of a high performing engineering and QA profession and a key contributor to strategic decision making across our enterprise environment. If you're a commercially minded, strategic technology leader who thrives on improving software delivery, we'd love to hear from you!