Vice President of Software Engineering
2 days ago
Manchester
The Role’s Purpose and Value: The Vice President / Senior Vice President of Software Engineering is responsible for defining, leading, and owning the engineering organisation that delivers Talogy’s product portfolio. This strategic role requires a leader who can build strong relationships across the organisation, collaborate effectively with senior stakeholders, and translate business priorities into a clear, scalable engineering strategy. The VP/SVP will shape Talogy’s engineering direction, partnering closely with the CTPO and business unit leads to identify, assess, and prioritise product initiatives. They will support sales and account management teams in client acquisition, retention, and growth by ensuring our technology capabilities meet evolving market needs. A key part of the role is leading and empowering the engineering organisation—ensuring teams are equipped, aligned, and enabled to deliver against the product roadmap. This role also plays a critical part in advancing Talogy’s use of AI, both in enhancing engineering productivity and in exploring how AI-driven capabilities can be responsibly incorporated into our products. This is a full-time, permanent position based in the UK or US, with flexible hours around core weekday availability. The role reports to Talogy’s Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO) and can be performed remotely, with occasional international travel for meetings, events, and workshops. Core Skills and Responsibilities: Technical Authority & Architecture Ownership: • Serve as the definitive technical decision-maker for Talogy’s engineering organisation — owning architectural direction, resolving technical trade-offs, and setting the standards by which all engineering work is evaluated., • Lead the Architectural Review Board with authority: evaluate and challenge architectural proposals, enforce consistency and scalability standards across all products, and ensure technical debt is actively managed and quantified., • Define and govern Talogy’s cloud infrastructure strategy (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including multi-tenant architecture, data isolation, platform reliability, and disaster recovery posture., • Own Talogy’s security engineering posture — including application security, secrets management, vulnerability management programmes, and compliance with SOC 2, GDPR, and relevant data protection frameworks., • Drive platform and integration architecture decisions across Talogy’s fragmented, acquisition-heavy tooling estate, bringing coherence to a complex multi-system environment., • Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with rigour — producing structured analysis on make-or-buy trade-offs, vendor selection, and technical partner assessments. AI Strategy & Enablement: • Define and lead Talogy’s AI engineering strategy — spanning both the use of AI to accelerate engineering productivity and the responsible integration of AI capabilities into Talogy’s products and assessments., • Establish a practical AI adoption roadmap: evaluate LLM/ML tooling, agentic frameworks, and AI-assisted development platforms; pilot responsibly; scale what works., • Ensure AI product features meet the ethical, legal, and regulatory expectations of an IO psychology and talent management context — including fairness, bias evaluation, explainability, and data governance., • Keep Talogy’s engineering teams ahead of the curve on applied AI — from code generation and test automation to AI-native product features and assessment intelligence. Team Leadership & Talent Development: • Lead, develop, and scale a geographically distributed engineering organisation spanning the US, UK, India, and other locations — setting a high bar for technical craft, delivery discipline, and team culture., • Recruit, retain, and grow senior engineering talent; lead a hiring bar that reflects the technical ambition of the organisation and establish career ladders that differentiate individual contributors from engineering managers., • Own engineering performance management end-to-end — establishing clear engineering metrics (deployment frequency, MTTR, lead time, reliability SLAs) and using them to drive accountability and improvement., • Create a culture of engineering excellence: code review rigour, documentation standards, testing philosophy, incident response maturity, and continuous learning., • Serve as the senior escalation point for major technical incidents — leading post-mortems, driving systemic remediation, and communicating clearly to the CTPO and wider leadership. Cross-Functional Collaboration: • Work in close partnership with the CTPO to operationalise the technology roadmap — owning engineering execution against strategic priorities and ensuring delivery keeps pace with product ambition., • Build trusted relationships with product, R&D, sales, and customer success leaders — ensuring technology is a competitive enabler and that engineering priorities are well understood across the business., • Communicate effectively with senior leaders to align on strategic priorities, resource needs, and long-term technology investments., • Build strong relationships with key stakeholders to deepen understanding of Talogy’s business, product visions, and customer needs. Execution & Delivery Excellence: • Oversee and continuously improve Talogy’s software delivery engine — including CI/CD pipelines, release management, deployment practices, observability, and incident management., • Champion Agile and DevSecOps practices across teams, ensuring engineering processes are lean, high-trust, and calibrated to the pace of the business., • Drive measurable improvement across DORA metrics and reliability targets; hold teams accountable to uptime SLAs and clear SLO definitions for all customer-facing products., • Identify and systematically eliminate engineering bottlenecks — from dependency bloat and test coverage gaps to deployment friction and inefficient on-call rotations., • Ensure development and deployment practices follow established standards and support reliable, secure, and scalable product delivery. Strategic Planning & Governance: • Co-develop the annual engineering budget and multi-year technology investment plan with the CTPO — translating engineering needs into financial terms that resonate with senior leadership., • Contribute to M&A technical due diligence: evaluate engineering organisations, technical debt, and platform compatibility as Talogy continues to grow through acquisition., • Create alignment between Talogy’s product vision, engineering strategy, and R&D initiatives., • Share ideas and foster knowledge exchange across development teams, creating opportunities for collaboration and innovation. Technical Expertise — Non-Negotiable: • 15+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in senior engineering leadership (Director, VP, or equivalent) at a B2B SaaS or enterprise software company., • Deep, hands-on background in backend systems, distributed architectures, and cloud-native platforms — able to credibly review design documents, challenge engineers on technical choices, and identify architectural risk., • Demonstrated proficiency in modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., Python, Java, C#, Node.js, Go) — not expected to write production code daily, but must be technically fluent enough to evaluate quality, complexity, and risk., • Strong command of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — including compute, storage, networking, identity, observability tooling, and cost management., • Proven experience owning CI/CD, DevSecOps, and modern delivery practices at scale — including IaC, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), blue-green or canary deployments, and automated quality gates., • Hands-on experience with data architecture, APIs, and integration patterns — particularly relevant given Talogy’s multi-platform, acquisition-heavy environment., • Direct experience with security engineering: application security frameworks (OWASP), secrets management, penetration testing programmes, and compliance regimes (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001). Leadership & Organisational Experience: • Significant experience in a senior engineering leadership role within an enterprise-scale cloud environment., • Demonstrated success building and scaling engineering organisations across multiple geographies and time zones, including managing offshore development teams and third-party engineering partners., • Experience leading engineering through significant organisational complexity — M&A integration, platform consolidation, or rapid headcount scaling., • Track record of attracting and retaining exceptional senior engineering talent; strong communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders. AI & Emerging Technology Experience: • Practical, hands-on experience with AI/ML integration in production software products — including LLM APIs, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation, or ML model pipelines., • Familiarity with integrating AI or machine-learning capabilities into software products, including an understanding of responsible AI principles, data considerations, and ethical implications., • Ability to cut through AI hype: evaluate vendor claims critically, identify where AI creates genuine value, and make pragmatic adoption decisions. Operational Excellence & Strategic Execution: • Demonstrated ability to use metrics and data to drive decision-making, operational improvements, and measurable outcomes., • Experience creating and executing comprehensive action plans that support organisational growth, technical maturity, and delivery excellence., • Background in B2B SaaS companies serving enterprise clients, particularly those with complex compliance, data residency, or security requirements., • Prior involvement in technical due diligence or post-merger engineering integration in a PE-backed, acquisitive environment is a strong differentiator.
