The role of the Head of Engineering will oversee Engineering Managers across multiple autonomous teams within the organization, aligned to Strategic Themes. They will be accountable for engineering delivery within their teams and will report on delivery plans, progress, risks and issues at their Strategic Themes’ Monthly Business Reviews.  

They will inspire teams to do great work, whilst reducing planning and execution friction. They will ensure team structures, delivery implementation, architectural and tooling choices are working effectively and make improvements where required. 

The Head of Engineering will also be aware of wider business requirements and will take onboard the expertise of colleagues to make technical choices that are then driven through to implementation and adoption. They will be able to build relationships across the company, be able to work with others and lead by example, translating vision to practical solutions on the ground. They will build strong partnerships with other senior stakeholders in the business including Product, Commercial, Marketing and Industry Relations. 

The Head of Engineering will be a technologist, ideally participating in technical communities, and with previous experience of managing an agile development capability. 

As Head of Engineering at Trainline you will... 🚄

• Oversee technical choices across the Strategic Theme, ensuring quality, reliability and product direction are all carefully considered and that choices are aligned with the organisation’s technology roadmap.  
• Be a valued contributor to the evolution of the Trainline Platform architecture, sharing best practices, liaising with the Architecture team and influencing Trainline’s Technology Roadmap. 
• Keep up-to-date with the latest relevant technologies, regularly evaluating their use for Trainline engineering. 
• Proactively ensure that security, reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency are included in technical and architectural discussions and provide guidance through their own experience to ensure risks are identified and mitigated.  
• Use their own experience to develop our culture of continuous improvement and innovation.  
• Inspire teams to drive for quality in everything they do. 
• Grow and mentor a diverse team of engineers and Engineering Managers, ensuring they are clear on our strategy, customer focus and inclusive culture.  
• Build relationships with other Heads of Engineering & Heads of Service Delivery to deliver on strategic objectives. 
• Develop partnerships with other functions, such as Commercial, Finance, HR, Marketing, Legal and Industry Relations to deliver successful outcomes across the business, not just at the engineering level. 
• Assess their team’s approach and process maturity, coaching them on Agile methods for sustainable delivery. 
• Coach and mentor engineering leads and managers, ensuring teams are creating well articulated and structured goals that are understood within the teams and align to company strategy. 
• Own the engineering budget for their Strategic Theme(s). 
• Support building Trainline’s external technology brand in the community. 
• Identify trends of issues across engineering teams and proactively work with other engineering leaders to address issues. 
• Will contribute to the development and implementation of the appropriate software delivery lifecycle to support the business. 
• Drive continuous improvement of software delivery lifecycle within their Strategic Theme and contribute to best practices across the whole engineering organisation. 
• Ensure appropriate software quality to deliver maintainability and reduce costs of running the Platform. 
• Ensure that the ongoing maintenance and support of the products and Platform is of the highest quality. 
• Providing an environment for continuous innovation and improvement. 

Software Engineering Expertise 

• A solid background in technology with demonstrable career progression through roles with increasing technical proficiency. 
• Experience as a Software Developer and/or Architect. 
• Development experience including test driven development, SOA, CI/CD. 
• Substantial experience in building and running services/applications in an agile environment. 
• Proven experience working with cloud providers such as AWS. 
• Technically strong enough to understand and guide software development choices within the team. 
• Ability to learn quickly and adapt to new technologies and approaches. 

Managing Engineering Delivery  

• A passion for engineering practices working with diverse, multi-location teams. 
• A strong track record of software delivery in a technology driven business, preferably in a large-scale B2C environment.   
• Strong proponent of automation with a willingness and drive to automate everything, ideally with prior experience in writing, testing and implementing enterprise-grade pipelines.  
• Has ideally worked in a product development environment, experience of working in partnership with Product teams. 
• Able to work alongside Product colleagues to prioritise the team’s work and make the right choices to meet the team’s goals in agreed timescales. 
• Experience in managing services/applications development with many stakeholders.  
• Budgetary experience, managing an engineering team budget, able to make budgetary decisions and trade-offs. 
• Deadline driven, understands how to balance meeting business targets while operating in an agile environment. 

People Management 

• Proven experience building high performing engineering teams. 
• Experience in managing managers, guiding careers and helping individuals recognize their potential. 
• Experience in managing challenging people scenarios (eg, performance improvement processes and organisational structure changes). 
• Able to lead by example, a hands-on technical engineer who can coach and develop technical talent. 
• Able to spot learning needs and skill gaps within the team, identify the need for training and liaise with other managers and HR to deliver appropriate resources. 
• Management of small scale (5-10 person) development teams working within large scale environment (5-20 teams). 

Communication and Relationships 

• Excellent interpersonal, relationship building and influencing skills.  
• Experience of developing strong partnerships with other business functions. 
• Strong communicator, able to adapt communication style appropriately dealing with a range of levels of seniority and technical understanding in the organization, up to c-suite. 
• Able to communicate with confidence and gravitas at company executive level.