Job Specifications
Job Description
Job Title: Head of Software Engineering
Band: Band 6
Salary: £72,771 - £80,776
Location: Liverpool, Newport, Birmingham
Contract Type: Permanent
Hours: Full Time
Closing Date: 09/03/2026
Interview Date(s): W/C 23rd March, psychometric testing to be completed 16-20th March
Crown Commercial Service (CCS) will become Government Commercial Agency (GCA) on 1 April 2026. Please visit our website for further details.
Insight into CCS - Webinar
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Call to action
We are seeking a highly experienced and inspiring Head of Software Engineering to lead our technical capability and drive the design, development, and operation of modern digital services. This role is central to the department's mission, requiring a leader who can blend exceptional technical expertise with a commitment to service led model and public value.
Job Summary
The Head of Software Engineering will provide strategic leadership and professional direction to our engineering community. You will be responsible for defining the technical standards, architectural principles, and engineering culture required to deliver world-class digital services. You will move the department away from legacy "point solutions" toward a unified, API-first, and cloud-native digital estate, ensuring our services are secure, scalable, and meet the GDS Service Standard.
Key Accountabilities
Technical Leadership & Strategy (Driving Excellence)
Engineering Strategy and Standards: Co-Define with Strategy and Architecture team and champion the long-term technical vision and technology strategy for the department’s services and platforms, ensuring alignment with central government technology policies (e.g., cloud-first, open standards).
Work with Heads of (Architecture, Delivery, Testing, Product) to implement the digital strategy using best practices
Establish and enforce best practices in CI/CD, SRE, TDD, and secure coding (OWASP).
Modernisation: Drive the roadmap for retiring legacy systems (e.g., migration of legacy portals to an Integrated Procurement Platform) while managing technical debt.
Open Standards: Ensure all software is "Open by Default," promoting re-use across the Civil Service and alignment with the Technology Code of Practice.
Be the ultimate owner of engineering quality, setting robust standards for clean code, test-driven development (TDD), CI/CD, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across all engineering teams.
Lead the development and modernisation of complex, large-scale systems, including integrating with legacy government systems
Ensure all software development meets the high standards of the Government Service Manual and passes all relevant Digital Service Assessments (Alpha, Beta, Live).
People & Capability Leadership (Growing Talent)
Build the Community: Act as the "Head of Profession" for software engineering, fostering a culture of continuous learning, psychological safety, and radical collaboration.
Capability Building: Lead recruitment, retention, and career development strategies. Define the "Definition of Done" and engineering excellence standards across all multidisciplinary teams. Establish and evolve the department’s DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology) Engineering Capability, defining clear career pathways, skills matrices, and professional development plans (including coaching and recruitment).
Mentorship: Coach Lead Developers and Senior Engineers, helping them grow into strategic technical leaders.
Line management and Activity management: Manage the development team of perm staff and Manage a balanced mix of civil service and third party resources, ensuring knowledge transfer, transition planning is built in technical delivery plans and building a sustainable in-house technical team.
Delivery, Governance & Stakeholder Management (Delivering Public Value)
Agile at Scale: Partner with Delivery Managers and Product Managers to ensure engineering capacity is aligned with the departmental roadmap (Now-Next-Later).
Assurance: Lead technical assessments and peer reviews to ensure services meet WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards and high-performance benchmarks.
SRE & Operations: Oversee the transition from "Build" to "Run," championing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps mindsets to ensure 24/7 service availability.
Represent the engineering function to senior internal and cross-government stakeholders, clearly articulating technical debt, risk, investment cases, and strategic decisions in non-technical terms.
Promote a culture of working in the open and sharing reusable components and best practices with the wider Civil Service DDaT community.
Essential Criteria (to Be Assessed At Application Stage)
Technical Depth: Proven experience in a senior engineering role (e.g., Head of Engineering, Lead Developer or Architect) building large-scale, distributed systems using modern languages (e.g., Java,