As a Head of Engineering at Endava, you will provide cohesive engineering leadership across Endava's internally-focused business systems, supporting the wider Endava organisation (People, Growth, Finance) and enabling teams (e.g., Integrations & Data, Enterprise, AI & Automation). You will raise engineering capability and consistency by championing high standards, quality, reliability, and team health so that Product strategy can be delivered predictably.
Reporting Line
- Reports to: SVP of Product Management (Application Management and Development).
- Directly career-coaches discipline leads (e.g., Engineering, QA/Automation, DevOps/SRE) and supports Tech Leads / Engineering Leads through coaching and community leadership.
- People leadership model: this role is a career coach and discipline leader to start with, not the primary day-to-day line manager for delivery teams.
Core Responsibilities
Talent & Growth
- Coach and develop engineering leadership (e.g., Tech Leads / Engineering Leads, Solutions Architects, Senior Engineers) through clear career paths, mentoring, and skills development.
- Identify systemic capability gaps and run targeted uplift initiatives (coaching, training, hiring support).
- Support hiring outcomes by shaping role profiles, participating in interviews, and helping onboard talent.
- Partner with Delivery Managers to improve resourcing effectiveness, match capability to priorities, and reduce single points of failure.
Technical Excellence
- Define and evolve a lightweight Business Systems Engineering Handbook with standards and guardrails (coding conventions, code review, branching, CI/CD quality gates, security in SDLC).
- Drive a deliberate technical debt approach: create visibility, prioritisation, and sustained burn-down tied to measurable outcomes.
- Ensure consistent platform and integration engineering practices across domains.
- Promote practical adoption of AI across engineering workflows and Endava's internally-focused business systems where it improves quality, speed, and reliability.
- Partner with Product Management (Product Owners and Business Analysts) and Delivery Managers to surface technical risks, dependencies, and constraints early.
Quality & Reliability
- Own the quality strategy and levels of test automation appropriate to each domain or team.
- Drive SRE fundamentals: reliability targets, incident management, and post-incident learning.
- Improve consistency of release standards, testing coverage, and operability across teams.
Ways of Working
- Promote consistent DevOps and release practices across teams: incremental delivery, trunk-based flow where feasible, automated quality gates.
- Strengthen documentation culture and knowledge sharing through engineering runbooks, ADRs, and onboarding guides.
- Guide and monitor the Definitions of Ready and Done in partnership with Product Management.
- Align engineering practices with Endava frameworks (e.g., TEAM, TEAS, Dava.Flow) and drive pragmatic adoption so teams operate consistently and perform at a high level.
Governance & Collaboration
- Be the engineering counterpart to Product leadership, clarify decision rights, ensure technical risks/constraints are visible, and keep engineering execution healthy.
- Act as a key stakeholder in EA-led design governance: ensure solutions are buildable, supportable, and consistent.
- Maintain a clear engagement model to minimise overlap:
- Delivery Managers own roadmap, scope, delivery outcomes, and budgets.
- Head of Engineering owns engineering standards, capability, quality/reliability, and technical execution health.