Travis Perkins Group is now hiring for an exceptional Head of Software Engineering to join our senior technology leadership team and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our business.
This is far more than a traditional engineering management role. You'll be a trusted advisor to directors, a leader of a high performing engineering and QA profession and a key contributor to strategic decision making across our enterprise environment.
If you're a commercially minded, strategic technology leader who thrives on improving software delivery, we'd love to hear from you!
This role is based out of Northampton and will require 3 office days per week.
As Head of Software Engineering, reporting into the Delivery & Engagement Director, you will provide strategic leadership and accountability for the delivery of software engineering and test automation across the Travis Perkins Group.
You'll oversee a profession of over 40 permanent colleagues, alongside flexible contract and partner resources. In this role, you will provide financial leadership over local people and third party contract budgets totalling £5m–£7m, ensuring our wider engineering capacity aligns with business demand. You'll also play a key role in driving continuous improvement across software systems, development processes and enterprise wide transformation programmes.
Engineering Leadership: Setting the strategy across all software engineering with regards to tooling, standards and ways of working to ensure cost effective, high quality outcomes.
Delivery & Collaboration: Making and fulfilling commitments to deliver value and change at pace while actively championing cross functional collaboration.
Service & Security: Driving technology objectives and security policies across the lifecycle, firmly embedding a modern DevSecOps mindset.
People Development: Leading, coaching and nurturing a large engineering team, developing a robust talent pipeline and building an inclusive, high performance culture.
Continuous Improvement: Utilising data driven KPIs, metrics and automation to evaluate and recommend new tools and practices that boost development efficiency.
Financial Management: Proactively managing direct and indirect budgets, identifying efficiency opportunities and aligning with Platforms for FinOps and cloud cost optimisation.
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Contracts & Partners: Proactively governing and managing third party suppliers, partners and vendors. Including all contractual elements of those relationships.
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Enterprise Leadership: Exerting wider influence outside your direct responsibility to help lead the overall Technology & Data function and build strong relationships with peers.
You'll be an experienced engineering leader who combines technical expertise with excellent commercial awareness, gravitas and stakeholder management skills.
Degree level qualification in Computer Science (or equivalent industry experience).
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Proven leadership experience managing people, large scale budgets (£3m+), and third-party vendor ecosystems.
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Proven track record of leading cultural transformation and technical legacy modernisation.
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Strong stakeholder management skills with an exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical executive stakeholders.
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Deep strategic understanding of software lifecycles, systems development, integration, test automation and modern DevSecOps practices.
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Resilient, empowering leadership style with a genuine commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Experience operating successfully within a large, disparate enterprise, retail, construction or supply-chain heavy industry.
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Exposure to ERP implementations or large-scale digital transformation programmes.
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Familiarity with FinOps principles, advanced information security management frameworks, or emerging tech integration (such as AI/LLMs into the SDLC).
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Industry certifications across Agile/Prince2 methodologies, Service Management (ITIL) or Cloud Architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP).
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Specific domain knowledge of our tech stack (e.g., Rocket Universe, Oracle, Klipboard, Java, React.JS, Kafka).
What’s in it for you?
We know the right leader has options, so we have built a package designed to reward the impact you will make:
Competitive base salary of plus an annual bonus linked to business performance
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Company car allowance
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Generous pension scheme with matched contributions (based on length of service)
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Save as you earn and share schemes that let you share in the Group's success.
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Colleague discount across Travis Perkins Group brands.
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Private medical cover
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Real career progression within one of the UK's largest merchant groups, with the visibility and scope that comes from a board level role in a high growth business.
This is a highly visible leadership role with significant influence across the organisation. You'll have the opportunity to:
Shape the overarching software engineering strategy for the UK’s leading group in our sector.
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Lead, coach and develop the largest technology profession within the department.
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Drive meaningful operational improvement by implementing cutting-edge automation, DevEx principles, and modern tools.
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Contribute directly to critical enterprise transformation initiatives that enable our long-term business strategy.
If you're an ambitious engineering leader looking for a role that combines strategic influence, operational leadership and commercial impact, we'd love to hear from you.
