Head of Software Engineering

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.

The Opportunity

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 will 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.

What You’ll Be Doing

• 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.
• Contracts & Partners: Proactively governing and managing third party suppliers, partners and vendors. Including all contractual elements of those relationships.
• Enterprise Leadership: Exerting wider influence outside your direct responsibility to help lead the overall Technology & Data function and build strong relationships with peers.

About You

You’ll be an experienced engineering leader who combines technical expertise with excellent commercial awareness, gravitas and stakeholder management skills.

Essential

• Degree level qualification in Computer Science (or equivalent industry experience).
• Proven leadership experience managing people, large scale budgets (£3m+), and third-party vendor ecosystems.
• Proven track record of leading cultural transformation and technical legacy modernisation.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with an exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical executive stakeholders.
• Deep strategic understanding of software lifecycles, systems development, integration, test automation and modern DevSecOps practices.
• Resilient, empowering leadership style with a genuine commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

We’d Particularly Like to See

• Experience operating successfully within a large, disparate enterprise, retail, construction or supply‑chain heavy industry.
• Exposure to ERP implementations or large‑scale digital transformation programmes.
• Familiarity with FinOps principles, advanced information security management frameworks, or emerging tech integration (such as AI/LLMs into the SDLC).
• Industry certifications across Agile/Prince2 methodologies, Service Management (ITIL) or Cloud Architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Specific domain knowledge of our tech stack (e.g., Rocket Universe, Oracle, Klipboard, Java, React.JS, Kafka).

What’s in it for you?

• Competitive base salary of plus an annual bonus linked to business performance.
• Company car allowance.
• Generous pension scheme with matched contributions (based on length of service).
• Save as you earn and share schemes that let you share in the Group's success.
• Colleague discount across Travis Perkins Group brands.
• Private medical cover.
• 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.

Why Join Us?

• Shape the overarching software engineering strategy for the UK’s leading group in our sector.
• Lead, coach and develop the largest technology profession within the department.
• Drive meaningful operational improvement by implementing cutting‑edge automation, DevEx principles, and modern tools.
• Contribute directly to critical enterprise transformation initiatives that enable our long‑term business strategy.

Ready to Make an Impact?

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.

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