VP of Engineering

We Improve Self Employment

How do we do it? With world-class products and unrivalled service. We are changing the landscape, giving the self-employment industry technology and benefits that they have never experienced before. Wise has seen exponential growth since it was founded in December 2019 and is now trusted by over 200 companies and some of the UK and Europe's biggest carrier networks.

Our Culture

Everyone in the Wise team is involved in our company's vision and success. Building the best products means we need the best team; we're proud of the team we've built so far and want to continue that growth. We're looking for passionate and collaborative self-starters who enjoy getting things done and know how to have fun while doing so. In return, our team is rewarded, recognised, and celebrated

Reporting into the CPTO, James Orton, the newly appointed VP, Engineering will lead the engineering organisation, (current team of 34), tasked with delivering an extensive product roadmap alongside onboarding new enterprise customers. The department is currently expanding from two to three cross-functional Agile squads, each comprising an Engineering Manager, Team Leader, QA and 5 Software Engineers. The tech stack consists of React, Go, Flutter, Postgres, AWS, Microservices and GraphQL.

The VP, Engineering will be focused around strategy, leadership, innovation and challenge technical thinking as opposed to being day to day hands on. A broad technical understanding is required but Wise require a talented leader who can deliver inspirational leadership, create a strong collaborative team, and push the boundaries of what`s possible to truly delight the client base.

Strategy

• Own, design and deliver world class customer and colleague technology solutions, ensuring service availability and performance that exceeds SLAs and expectations.

• Ensuring that the technology infrastructure scales, on demand, for business growth and peak business volumes.

• Ongoing definition of the technology strategy, recognising the need to make trade-offs whilst aligning to budget expectations.

Team building

• Define and update the engineering organisational structure to facilitate product development goals, attracting, retaining and developing top talent.

• Coach senior team members including Engineering Managers. Mentor and provide support ensuring they reach their full potential.

• Own performance management for the engineering team, promoting learning and development throughout the journey.

• Transition the team from a start-up to scale-up mindset. Leverage hybrid working to create coherent, motivated teams who are passionate to deliver their very best.

Technology

• Together with the Head of Architecture and Tech Leads, refine the technical architecture and determine the infrastructure roadmap. Make smart choices to control technical debt whilst moving quickly.

• Keep up to date with new technologies, lead the team in selecting the most appropriate technology for the situation.

• Continue to survey the technology landscape for products and services that could compliment the Wise portfolio.

Delivery

• Enable product engineering teams, operating in a high quality, high throughput agile manner to build world class capability aligned with the company vision and purpose.

• Estimate, communicate and deliver to deadlines, ensuring appropriate processes and ways of working are in place, in conjunction with Engineering Managers.

• Facilitate and drive a continuous improvement culture fostering innovation along the way.

• Champion and employ engineering best practices for development, testing and DevOps.

Communication

• Align engineering with the product, sales and finance functions to ensure a strong collaboration that sets the organisation up for success.

• Translate business objectives into technical milestones, communicate clearly, expressing business goals to the engineering team, and tech strategy to stakeholders.

• Constant liaison and interaction with the senior leadership team, putting in place the measurement and reporting of KPIs to determine success and speed to achieve the goal.

About you

• A strong and proven track record as a Software / Technology Leader, able to inspire an engineering organisation that reaches and exceeds professional and personal aspirations.

• A commercial mindset, able to envisage the goals of the business and how engineering and product development can support the long term company aims.

• Prior experience of leading and coaching Engineering Management, able to create strong succession.

• A track record working in a SaaS product environment, able to practically apply Agile ways of working and delivery.

• Strong experience having operated in Cloud and Product heavy environments. Experience of AWS would be useful.

• Ability to define, gather, and use key input and output data metrics across the areas of business, product, engineering, and service impact to improve Engineering quality and throughput.

• Experience of recruiting high-performing teams, ideally utilising both FTEs and contractors, onshore and offshore.

• A proactive, high-energy approach; motivating your team to drive for success and have fun, taking pride in their work.

• Ability to work in a demanding environment at pace, prior experience working in a PE backed group would be advantageous.

• Low ego - is motivated by the success of the Engineering and wider Technology and Product organisation rather than purely personal recognition.

This search is being lead by Harvey Nash who will be reviewing all applications and managing the process from here.

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