Director - Payments Engineering

Purpose of the role:

The job is a leadership and transformation role for the front-to-back Engineering team supporting Payments Technology. This will encompass accountability for application design, development and testing through to production implementation. The individual will be responsible for driving a wholesale transformation of this department including adoption of Dev Ops, migration to agile delivery, cross-skilling of the team and front-to-back delivery process automation to enable removal of manual testers and significant increase in delivery capability, cadence and quality. The individual will need to bring substantial thought leadership for the transformation and have the ability to evolve and revise the strategy as necessary. The individual will be responsible for the local management of the team in India (vendor and permanent employee mix) and will involve facing off to IT teams globally.

The role will involve taking the lead for the team technically and managerially, including gaining a full understanding of the underlying systems tools and processes to ensure that the required transformation is delivered. The system stack is highly complex, and an ability to dive deeply into technical issues and transformation blockers is paramount. Individual need to have engineering background and good understanding of delivery lifecycle and ability to engage in complex conversations with Architecture and Design. The individual also needs to manage multiple stakeholders locally and globally including at Managing Director level. The individual will be required to communicate issues and status at all levels of the organisation as well as managing vendor relationships tightly.

Person Specification:

- Technology qualifications as undergraduate or postgraduate

- Understanding of financial services

- Overall IT experience including evidence of driving large scale engineering transformations, dev ops adoption and agile adoption

- Experience of leading, managing and coaching a high performing application/software development team. Should have strong technical background and should have delivered large scalable projects. Should have Architecture/Design acumen

- Strong people management skills, ideally proven leading a large team

- Proven track record in vendor management

- Ability to operate within a complex systems environment with a layered software stack and highly interdependent systems.

- A good understanding of Dev Ops tools and their application in the software development lifecycle is required

- A good working knowledge of Payments business area would also be valued.

- Proactive approach, committed, team-focused work ethic

- Excellent communication skills that can transcend both junior and senior audiences

- Ability to influence and lead is also needed

- Experience of going through the Captive lifecycle and insourcing key IP roles into the organisation would also be beneficial

- Ability scale up and should be able to manage various levels of stakeholders up to and including MD level

- Demonstrable experience of driving innovation and realising the associated value would also be required