Senior Director, Engineering - Corporates, Financial Institutions & Sovereigns (Manchester)
15 days ago
Manchester
This job is with Fitch Group, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly. Fitch Ratings Fitch Ratings is looking for a builder, a challenger, and a boundary-pusher to lead the engineering organization responsible for all applications and services powering our Corporates, Financial Institutions, and Sovereigns lines of business. This is not a role for someone who optimizes within the status quo — it's a role for someone who questions it, reimagines it, and has the courage and capability to do something about it. As Senior Director, you will have executive ownership of four engineering teams comprising a couple of dozen engineers. You'll lead a talented, multidisciplinary group tackling some of the most consequential technology challenges in global financial intelligence — maintaining and evolving the systems that analysts and clients depend on today, while simultaneously building the next generation of platforms from a position of real creative freedom and organizational backing. This is a role for someone who moves fast, experiments boldly, and doesn't wait for permission to try something new. Someone who has broken things in the pursuit of building something better, who sees constraints as invitations to be clever, and who brings an infectious sense of possibility that raises the ambition of everyone around them. If you've spent time deep in machine learning or AI systems — not just using them, but building them — that's not just a bonus, it's the kind of background that makes this opportunity even more compelling. But this role goes far beyond any single discipline: it's about leading a culture of relentless innovation across every dimension of how software gets built and delivered. Challenge the conventional and set a bolder technical vision Own the strategic direction, execution, and engineering culture of four high-performing full-stack engineering teams. But more than managing what exists — interrogate it. Ask the uncomfortable questions about why things are built the way they are, and lead your teams toward answers that are smarter, faster, and more powerful. Set a technical vision that doesn't just improve the current state but genuinely reimagines what's possible for the platforms powering Fitch's most critical analytical work. Build, develop, and inspire exceptional people Lead, mentor, and empower a team of team leads and engineers across a range of technical backgrounds and experience levels. Foster a culture where intellectual curiosity is celebrated, where experimentation is encouraged, and where people feel safe enough to take risks and learn loudly from what doesn't work. Attract and retain engineers who are hungry, inventive, and proud of both the quality of what they ship today and the audacity of what they're building toward. Reimagine and modernize critical platforms Oversee the full lifecycle of the applications and services central to Fitch's Corporates, Financial Institutions, and Sovereigns analytical workflows. Balance the discipline of maintaining production-grade systems with the creative ambition to tear down and rebuild what no longer serves the business well. Be the person in the room who asks "what if we started over?" — and who knows when that's exactly the right call. Drive greenfield innovation without apology Identify and actively pursue opportunities to design and build net-new applications and platforms that replace or leapfrog legacy approaches. Embrace the blank canvas — and bring the rigor of world-class software delivery with you. This is an organization that wants to see bets placed, experiments run, and lessons learned fast. Be the kind of leader who creates that energy and channels it into things that last. Push the frontier of AI, ML, and intelligent systems Go beyond adopting AI tools — define how intelligent systems become structural, load-bearing parts of the platforms your teams own. Whether that's LLM-powered workflows, ML models embedded in analytical processes, agentic automation, or AI-augmented developer tooling, bring the depth to evaluate, architect, and champion these capabilities with real technical conviction. If you've built ML systems from the ground up, that experience will resonate deeply here — and you'll have the platform to apply it in genuinely high-stakes, high-visibility ways. Influence across a complex and interconnected stakeholder landscape Act as a strategic partner to a broad and diverse set of stakeholders — including senior leadership, analytical teams, operations, and business relationship management — whose workflows and outcomes depend directly on the platforms your teams own. Navigate a rich ecosystem of technical interdependencies, partnering with peer engineering teams whose systems integrate with, depend on, or are shaped by what your teams build. Build organizational credibility through consistent delivery, clear technical vision, and the ability to bring bold ideas to life in ways that earn trust across the business. • 18+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with substantial time in senior technical leadership roles overseeing multiple teams and disciplines, • Proven multi-team leadership — demonstrated experience leading team leads and engineers across full-stack disciplines; a track record of building high-performing, inventive engineering cultures at meaningful scale, • Deep technical credibility and hands-on instinct — strong command of modern software architecture, cloud-native platforms, and production-grade application delivery; you know when to go deep, and your teams and peers will know it too, • Full-stack engineering expertise — proven background with modern enterprise technology stacks, including React, Java, and/or Python in production environments, deployed across AWS and/or Azure, • A bias for experimentation and innovation — a demonstrable history of pushing technical boundaries, challenging inherited assumptions, and driving teams toward approaches that are meaningfully better — not just incrementally improved, • Modernization and greenfield experience — proven ability to evolve existing platforms while simultaneously designing and delivering new systems; comfort making bold architectural decisions in both constrained legacy and open greenfield environments, • People leadership and talent development — demonstrated ability to attract, grow, and retain exceptional engineers and engineering leaders; a builder of teams as much as systems, with a genuine investment in the growth of the people around you, • Cross-functional stakeholder management — proven ability to partner effectively across analytical, operational, and business-facing teams as well as peer technical organizations; skilled at managing competing priorities and driving alignment across a complex interdependency landscape, • Executive communication — the ability to translate bold technical vision for non-technical audiences, build trust through delivery, and make complex ideas land clearly at every level of the organization, • Education: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field — or equivalent expertise demonstrated through impact, • An ML or AI engineering background — if you've spent meaningful time building machine learning systems, training models, designing intelligent pipelines, or architecting AI-native applications, that depth is genuinely exciting for this role and will shape how you lead, what you build, and the kind of talent you attract, • Deep cloud-native expertise — hands-on mastery of AWS and/or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, microservices architecture, and sophisticated CI/CD and deployment pipelines for large-scale application delivery, • Generative AI and intelligent systems experience — hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG architectures, agentic workflows, or production ML systems; the ability to move between engineering credibility and strategic vision without losing altitude, • AI-native delivery leadership — direct experience implementing AI-augmented development lifecycles, intelligent testing pipelines, or AI-assisted tooling that materially raises the quality and velocity of engineering teams, • Transformation and platform modernization leadership — a history of successfully reimagining complex, production-critical platforms while maintaining delivery continuity and rallying teams around a compelling future state, • A maverick streak with enterprise judgment — the rare combination of someone who genuinely challenges conventions and moves with urgency, but knows how to do it within a complex organization without losing stakeholders along the way, • Financial services domain knowledge — familiarity with analytical workflows, credit ratings processes, or how technology creates leverage in financial decision-making, • Technical thought leadership — contributing to open source, speaking at industry events, publishing engineering content, or establishing technical direction that influences well beyond your immediate team, • A genuine mandate to innovate — not a talking point, but real organizational backing to question, challenge, and rebuild the platforms powering some of Fitch's most critical business lines, • Executive visibility and strategic influence — direct access to senior leadership, the platform to shape engineering direction across consequential lines of business, and the opportunity to leave a lasting mark on how global financial intelligence is delivered, • The intersection of depth and breadth — lead a capable, experienced engineering organization while simultaneously running a bold innovation agenda; this role sits at a genuinely rare intersection of operational accountability and creative freedom, • A place where ML and AI expertise becomes architecture — if you've built intelligent systems, this is an environment where that knowledge doesn't sit on the shelf; it shapes product direction, platform design, and how the organization thinks about what's next, • Cutting-edge technology and continuous learning — access to the latest AI tools, frameworks, platforms; training and conference budgets; and the expectation that you'll stay at the leading edge and pull your teams forward with you, • Career acceleration at scale — high visibility to the most senior leaders at Fitch, a clear path to principal and executive roles, and the opportunity to define what AI-driven financial technology looks like in practice, • A culture that rewards curiosity — an environment where bold ideas are welcomed, where experimentation is celebrated, and where the best thinking wins regardless of where it comes from At Fitch Group, the combined power of our global perspectives is what differentiates us. Our global network of colleagues comes together to accomplish things greater than they ever could alone. Every team member is essential to our business, and each perspective is critical to our success. We embrace a diverse culture that encourages a free exchange of ideas, guaranteeing your voice will be heard and your work will have an impact, regardless of seniority. We are building incredible things at Fitch and we invite you to join us on our journey. Fitch Group is a global leader in financial information services with operations in more than 30 countries. Wholly owned by the Hearst Corporation, we are comprised of three main businesses: Fitch Ratings | Fitch Solutions | Fitch Learning. For more information please visit our websites: | | _ Fitch is committed to providing global securities markets with objective, timely, independent and forward-looking credit opinions. To protect Fitch's credibility and reputation, our employees must take every precaution to avoid conflicts of interests or any appearance of a conflict of interest. Should you be successful in the recruitment process at Fitch Ratings you will be asked to declare any securities holdings and other potential conflicts prior to commencing employment. If you, or your immediate family, have any holdings that may conflict with your work responsibilities, you may be asked to divest yourself of them before beginning work. Fitch Group is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status, and other statuses protected by law. #LI-Group #LI-AT #LI-Hybrid
Chef & Cook
Waiters
Bar Staff
Retail
Kitchen Porter
Barista
Quick Service
Accounting & Finance
Animal Care
Art, Media, Design
Child Care
Cleaning
Construction & Trades
Customer Service
Driver & Delivery
Education
Engineering
Entertainment
Events & Promotion
Fashion
Health & Social Care
Host & Hostess
Information Technology
Legal
Management
Manufacturing
Office & Admin
Sales & Marketing
Salon & Beauty
Science
Security
Sports & Wellness
Warehouse
Writing & Editing