The Engineering Delivery Head is responsible for establishing and scaling the operating model of the DTC Engineering. The role partners closely with the Head of Engineering, Engineering Directors, HR, and Talent Acquisition to ensure the organisation executes effectively against strategic priorities.
The role owns engineering portfolio governance, organisation planning, people strategy, delivery excellence, operating rhythms, executive reporting, and continuous improvement initiatives that enable the DTC Engineering & TechHub organization to scale sustainably.
This role does not directly own software engineering teams. Instead, it ensures the organisation has the right people, processes, governance, operating mechanisms, and execution discipline required to deliver business outcomes.
Key Responsibilities & Scope of Ownership:
Engineering Operating Model & Governance
- Own and continuously improve the engineering operating model.
- Establish governance forums, leadership cadences, planning cycles, and review mechanisms.
- Drive consistency in ways of working across domains, squads, projects, and delivery teams in partnership with Product & Project leadership.
- Facilitate cross-functional alignment between Engineering, Product, Architecture, Security, Data, and Operations teams.
- Ensure clear accountability, RACI models, and decision-making frameworks are adopted across the organisation.
- Lead continuous improvement initiatives focused on engineering effectiveness and operational excellence.
- Lead organisational change initiatives to drive adoption of new operating models, processes, tools and ways of working.
Delivery Excellence & Process Management
- Define and track engineering KPIs across flow, quality, reliability, predictability, productivity, and business outcomes.
- Drive delivery planning and execution reviews across the portfolio.
- Identify delivery risks, bottlenecks, dependency challenges, and organisational impediments.
- Establish standard operating procedures, governance controls, and best practices for execution.
- Partner with Engineering Directors to improve release predictability, quality, and delivery performance.
- Champion AI-native ways of working and continuous optimisation across the software development lifecycle.
Strategy & Portfolio Management
- Partner with the Head of Engineering to define and execute the Engineering strategy and annual operating plan.
- Facilitate prioritisation, capacity planning, and demand management across engineering portfolio.
- Manage strategic staffing and technology partners, ensuring workforce quality, cost effectiveness and alignment with capability needs.
- Establish portfolio governance processes, review forums, and decision-making mechanisms within the engineering organization.
- Track strategic initiatives, OKRs, milestones, dependencies, risks, and outcomes across the engineering organisation.
- Provide executive-level reporting and insights to leadership stakeholders.
People Strategy & Organisation Development
- Define workforce planning strategy aligned with TechHub growth objectives.
- Partner with Talent Acquisition on hiring plans, workforce mix, and critical capability acquisition.
- Drive organisation design, succession planning, leadership development, and talent reviews.
- Establish onboarding, career progression, mentoring, and internal mobility frameworks.
- Partner with Engineering Directors to improve engineering culture, engagement, retention, and organisational effectiveness.
- Track and report people-related metrics, including hiring velocity, attrition, organisational health, and capability maturity.
Organization Operations & Leadership Support
- Partner with TechHub Lead to establish and scale the operating model, including workforce strategy, capability development, governance, and organisational effectiveness.
- Prepare leadership reviews, executive presentations and strategic communications.
- Coordinate organisation-wide planning events, budgeting cycles, and operational reviews.
- Drive execution of strategic initiatives and leadership action items.
- Ensure decisions are tracked, communicated, and implemented across the organisation.
- Support culture-building initiatives and employee engagements.
Key Requirements:
- 12+ years in engineering, with significant time in delivery/engineering-ops leadership.
- Demonstrated ownership of organisational design, career frameworks, and engineering operating models.
- Experience leading portfolio governance, prioritisation, and capacity planning across multiple teams and domains.
- Strong stakeholder management across distributed/global teams as well as senior leadership.
- Comfortable operating both strategically (portfolio, org design) and tactically (process, reporting).
- Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organisations and delivery functions.
- Working knowledge of Agile/Scrum and hybrid product-project delivery models
- Data-driven approach to decision-making, with fluency in engineering and delivery metrics/dashboards.
- Experience partnering with Finance/HR on budgeting, workforce planning, and cost optimization.
- Experience establishing engineering operating rhythms, governance forums, executive reviews and performance management.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting to executive leadership.
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or relate
