Group Head of Engineering

Virgin Active are committed to changing people's lives for the better through wellness. Our team are dedicated to delivering a unique leisure and relaxation experience throughout all our clubs. All our team members pride themselves on incorporating Virgin Active values and ensuring the highest Brand Standards into their work, so our members can experience the finest facilities and service. We take value in recruiting the very best team members who work behind the scenes to support our clubs in delivering a world class member experience. We are looking for a Group Head of Engineering to join our Digital & Technology Transformation Team.

As Group Head of Engineering, you will set the engineering strategy and lead delivery at scale, building an organisation that consistently ships high-quality outcomes with pace and reliability.

Working in close partnership with Product and Design, you will operate as part of a leadership trio, shaping vision, translating member needs into tangible outcomes, and making smart trade-offs. This is a hands-on technical leadership role requiring deep engineering credibility, strong architectural judgement, and the ability to lead through complex delivery with best-in-class standards

The Role

• Define and lead the engineering strategy across digital and in-club platforms, aligned to transformation priorities

• Set clear architectural direction and embed modern engineering standards (cloud-first, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, secure SDLC)

• Own end-to-end delivery outcomes, ensuring valuable increments are shipped frequently, safely, and predictably

• Drive operational excellence across reliability, resilience, performance, and security

• Establish decision-making guardrails that enable pace while reducing long-term technical complexity

• Lead incident and problem management with a strong focus on root cause resolution and systemic prevention

• Strengthen engineering governance, documentation, KPIs, and service ownership across domains

• Champion innovation and responsible AI adoption where it delivers measurable value

• Improve developer productivity through investment in tooling, automation, and engineering environments

• Translate engineering performance data into actionable insight to continuously optimise delivery and quality

• Build and scale a high-performing, multi-site engineering organisation with clear career pathways

• Foster a culture of accountability, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement

Experience

• Senior engineering leader with strong hands-on technical credentials.

• Deep experience across cloud-first architectures, distributed systems, CI/CD, observability, and secure SDLC.

• Experience delivering AI-enabled capabilities into production environments.

• Proven track record of improving reliability and leading incident response and prevention.

• Experience scaling engineering teams across multiple locations.

• Strong stakeholder leadership and commercial acumen.

• Outcome-led, data-informed, decisive, and comfortable operating in ambiguity.

• Values-driven, collaborative, and highly credible with engineering teams

Our Perks

• 25 days (excluding bank holidays) annual leave, plus a Celebration Day – and we want you take them
• Access to Scottish Widows Pension with us matching contributions up 5%
• Complimentary Virgin Active membership for you and a buddy. You can also get free membership for your children too, ability to take advantage of our Club V.
• Private Dental and Healthcare Insurance – your physical health is important, and we want you to have the access to healthcare should you require it.
• Life Assurance 4x your salary – which we hope you will not need.
• We want you to love Virgin Active like we do, so you get discounts across Virgin active – everything from guest passes to 50% off PT sessions.
• You will join Virgin Family - where not only can you communicate with your colleagues across Virgin Group, but also many discounts (including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Holidays and Virgin Media/O2)
• Maintaining a healthy diet while at work can be hard, so we offer all our team members 20% off food and drink at our KAUAI branches located in clubs.
• Managing finances can be difficult, so we offer access to Salary Finance. They can support you with loans and savings plans, as well as help you become a personal finance expert.
• Mental health is a cornerstone of wellbeing. Our BUPA employer assistance programme is there when you need a helping hand with 4 free counselling sessions.
• We know finding a new home to rent can be stressful. We partner with Dexters who offer complimentary corporate letting services – meaning no tenant charges.
• Access to ePoints, offering loads of online discounts to retailers.
• Always wanted to take that yoga course? Well VA offer discount on all their Academy courses, trained by the very best instructors.