Practice Director - Engineering

Role Purpose:

• Determine ‘How’ work within the Practice is done and ‘Who’ does the work 

• Drive continuous improvements so that resource effort to deliver BAU activities is reduced enabling increased resource effort to support projects in the future 
• Drive change and be an ‘agent of change’ across the Practice 
• Develop and maintain standards and policies governing Solution Design and Service Architecture to drive efficient engineering across the Practice.
• Govern agreed design and engineering standards to drive consistency across service families
• Establish quality and security assurance through effectively leading a team of specialist IT professionals focused on creating simple and scalable solutions to complex problems via design and engineering.  
• Rapidly embed and mature a successful engineering discipline within UKCloud so that our portfolio can be scaled gracefully.

• Drive an effective service transition process through shared workflow alliance with other Practices within the Capability Lifecycle operating unit to ensure seamless deployment into operations.

Key Responsibilities:  

• Create the cross-service line architectural road maps, from which architectural design principles, framework and governance can be driven against
• Design the cross-service family architectural efficiencies and under-pinning tooling 
• Ensure a ‘joined up’ approach and early identification of dependencies and integration points
• Ensure up-to-date documentation sets (in accordance with defined principles and methodologies) are in place that support the creation of services and the technology product components. This includes Service Design, Technology Design / Architecture (Customer Experience, Security)
• Actively run the Architecture Review Board (ARB)
• Ensure production of high-level designs and resultant low-level designs to scope effort and proceeds to prove and iterate the design into a package that can be tested and rolled out autonomously and independently. 
• Ensure creation of key processes for implementation/deployment (automated and/or manual)
• Ensure continuous enhancement of quality and tested engineering release packages across environments
• Actively support career development opportunities aligned with improving the overall capability of the Engineering Practice
• Maintains accurate team velocity across BAU and other categories for the wider business.

Knowledge/Skills/Experience:

• Demonstrable experience in building a successful and scalable design and engineering function 
• Experience coaching others to adopt best practice
• Ability to lead governance and assurance activities
• Highly organised – a good planner
• Excellent and clear communicator (written, verbal and visual)

Your Profile:

• Strong written and oral communication. Systematic and organised.
• Ability to prioritise workloads and produce high quality output
• Ability to present technical issues and solutions to a variety of audiences 
• Ability to work effectively in a team and across multi-functional teams
• Embrace and champion the use of automation across the platform

About UKCloud

UKCloud provides an unbeatable, secure UK public cloud. Focused solely on serving the UK Public Sector. We are committed to assurance and security while delivering flexible, agile and value-based cloud hosting to our customers.

• Doing the right thing. By delivering better services to citizens and better value for taxpayers, by reducing the time, costs, and risks of digital transformation.
• Accelerating digitalisation with local multi-cloud experts. Our award-winning customer support is here to help our customers throughout their journey with us.
• Harnessing multiple cloud services. To help organisations use multi-cloud to address existing and legacy IT as well as cloud native applications.
• Uncompromising safety and integrity. As we believe the UKs public services are a national asset that needs protecting and nurturing.

Formed in 2012, UKCloud is based in Farnborough (Hampshire) and Corsham (Wiltshire). We have a team of 200+ people and we continue to grow! We are looking for people who want a rewarding career in a business who truly invest in you as an individual.

Colleague Benefits:

Competitive salary plus 10% bonus potential paid quarterly

25 days' annual leave increasing to 30 days with length of service + half day birthday leave + charity day + Bank Holidays

Options to buy and sell annual leave

Flexible office and home working options 

Contributory pension

Life and medical insurance

Funded team social and charity events

Onsite facilities including cafe, restaurant and gym

Company funded fruit and soft drinks plus Friday breakfasts

Wellbeing initiatives

Cycle to work tax efficient scheme

Access to ample free parking

Shuttle bus to national rail services

UKCloud is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible applicants. Applicants must be eligible to work and live in the UK and will be required to undergo and maintain appropriate UK government security clearance.