Head of Engineering | Business Systems

As a Head of Engineering at Endava, you will provide cohesive and empowering engineering leadership across our Business Systems domains (People, Growth, Finance) and enabling platforms (Integrations & Data, Enterprise Systems, AI & Automation). You will elevate engineering capability and consistency by championing high standards, quality, reliability, and strong team health—creating the clarity, alignment, and predictability needed to deliver product strategy with confidence and measurable impact.

Core Responsibilities

Talent & Growth

• Develop and empower engineering leaders (Engineering Leads, Tech Leads, Solution Architects, Senior Engineers) through clear career pathways, structured mentoring, and continuous skills development.

• Identify systemic capability gaps and drive targeted uplift initiatives through coaching, training, and strategic hiring support to strengthen overall engineering maturity.

• Shape and support hiring outcomes by defining role profiles, participating in interviews, and ensuring we attract and onboard high-quality engineering talent aligned with our standards and culture.

• Partner with Delivery Managers (PDMs) to improve workforce planning and allocation effectiveness—aligning capability to business priorities while reducing single points of failure and building resilient, cross-skilled teams.

Technical Excellence

• Define and evolve a lightweight Business Systems Engineering Handbook that sets clear standards and guardrails (coding conventions, code reviews, branching strategy, CI/CD quality gates, security embedded in SDLC) while enabling teams to move with pace.

• Drive a deliberate technical debt strategy—creating visibility, clear prioritisation, and sustained burn-down plans tied to measurable business and operational outcomes.

• Ensure consistent platform and integration engineering practices across domains, promoting reuse, scalability, and long-term maintainability.

• Partner closely with Product Management (Product Owners, Business Analysts) and Delivery Managers (PDMs) to surface technical risks, dependencies, and constraints early—enabling informed decision-making and reducing delivery friction.

Quality & Reliability

• Own the quality strategy across Business Systems domains, defining appropriate levels of test automation and quality practices aligned to product and platform needs.

• Embed SRE fundamentals—establishing reliability targets, strengthening incident management, and fostering a culture of post-incident learning and continuous improvement.

• Increase consistency in release standards, testing coverage, and operability to ensure systems are resilient, observable, and supportable at scale.

Ways of Working

• Promote consistent DevOps and release practices across teams—encouraging incremental delivery, trunk-based development where feasible, and automated quality gates.

• Strengthen documentation and knowledge-sharing culture through pragmatic engineering runbooks, ADRs (Architecture Decision Records), and onboarding guides.

• Guide and uphold clear Definitions of Ready and Done in partnership with Product Management to improve flow, quality, and shared accountability.

• Align engineering practices with Endava frameworks (e.g., TEAM, TEAS, Dava.Flow)—driving pragmatic adoption so teams operate consistently and perform at a high level without unnecessary overhead.

Governance & Collaboration

• Act as the engineering counterpart to Product leadership—clarifying decision rights, ensuring technical risks and constraints are visible, and maintaining healthy engineering execution.

• Contribute as a key stakeholder in EA-led design governance, ensuring solutions are buildable, supportable, and aligned with enterprise standards.

• Maintain a clear engagement model to minimise overlap:

  • Delivery Managers (PDMs) own roadmap, scope, delivery outcomes, and budgets.

  • Head of Engineering owns engineering standards, capability, quality & reliability, and technical execution health.