Head of Application Delivery

Office Locations: Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bolton, Southport, Newcastle, Reading, Birmingham, Northampton, Cambridge, Derby, Oxford and Nottingham

Hybrid working available – with the flexibility to work from home and collaborate in-office when needed. We believe we offer our colleagues the best hybrid and flexible working practices, balancing working from home with time collaborating and socialising with colleagues in our modern offices.

Fletchers Group have a fantastic opportunity to join our growing Team.

We’re looking for a Head of Application Delivery to lead and unite two development teams across Fletchers Solicitors and Blume. This is a leadership and governance role, you’ll be the person who ensures our development capability is well-run, well-governed, and well-positioned for what’s coming next, including the accelerating impact of AI on how development team’s work.

You’ll oversee a team of 10 Systems Developers at Fletchers, who own the Proclaim case management estate and the systems that surround it, and a team of 5 Salesforce Developers at Blume. This is not a hands-on development role. You won’t be writing code. What you will do is lead people who do, and to do that well, you need to know what good looks like: good code, good architecture, good process, and good delivery.

The role reports directly to the Technical Director and works closely with the Head of Legal Technology and the Technical Delivery Manager, together these three roles are responsible for ensuring both the application strategy and the day-to-day change agenda are delivered to the right standard.

In return Fletchers offers:

• 35 hours working week
• Bonus scheme (subject to targets being met)
• 35 days holiday a year including bank holidays and Christmas Closure, you also have an option to purchase up to 3 extra days’ holiday per year, until you long service award the 3 days after your 5 th , 7 th, and 9 th full year of employment
• Pension scheme with NI-efficient salary sacrifice option
• Life Assurance Policy
• Medicash policy to cover some dental, optical and other medical expenses
• Company sick pay
• Enhanced Maternity, Paternity and IVF schemes
• Flexible, agile working environment with a positive work-life balance
• Varied calendar of funded company social events (check out Fletchers Group on LinkedIn)
• Monthly voucher awardsfor winning nominees
• A genuinely supportive and friendly culture
• Ongoing training and professional development opportunities

What you’ll own:

Development Governance

You’ll own the end-to-end application delivery lifecycle across both teams, from how work is sized and prioritised, tested, released, and supported. Sprint discipline, release management, change control processes, CI/CD pipeline governance, and environment management are all core to this role. You will work closely with the Technical Delivery Manager and the Transformation team across these areas, bringing the technical authority on what good looks like and ensuring standards are maintained.

Delivery Oversight

You’ll be accountable for the health of the delivery pipeline across both teams. That means understanding what’s in flight, what’s at risk, and what needs to be escalated. You need to be close enough to the work to ask the right questions, challenge estimates, understand the design and engineering expectations behind what is being built, and protect your teams from unrealistic demands. The developers do the building; you create the conditions for them to do it well.

Application & Platform Standards

Working closely with the Head of Legal Technology, you will ensure that all development activity meets the architectural and quality standards set for the group’s platforms. Your role is to make sure the change agenda is executed efficiently and that what gets built delivers upon expectations, not just speed.

The Fletchers team manages Proclaim and a wider ecosystem of connected systems central to how the business operates daily. You’ll need to understand the architecture, the dependencies, and the operational risks well enough to make sound decisions about priorities, technical debt, and change risk, without needing to be the one writing the solution.

The Blume team works on Salesforce, CRM configuration, development, and integrations. You’ll oversee the same quality and governance standards here, working with the Blume leadership team to align development activity to business needs.

You will oversee system monitoring across the application estate, ensuring issues are identified early and acted on quickly. Beyond day-to-day stability, you will maintain a clear view of how both teams are operating, using that to drive continuous improvement, refining processes, raising standards, and ensuring the teams are always moving forward.

AI Strategy and Adoption

This is a non-negotiable part of the role. AI is changing how development teams work, from code generation and review, to automated testing, documentation, and analysis. We expect our teams to be ahead of this, not catching up. You’ll lead our thinking on where and how AI tooling can raise quality and speed up delivery, build a practical adoption roadmap, and create the culture where experimentation is expected. If you’re not already thinking about this, this isn’t the right role.

People and Team Development

You’ll line-manage team leads and senior developers across both teams. Career development, performance conversations, and building a team that people want to stay in are all yours.

What we’re looking for:

Must-haves:

• Proven experience leading software development teams, ideally across multiple products or business units.
• Strong command of the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through to testing, release, and ongoing application management, with experience establishing or improving the governance and processes that sit around it.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, system monitoring, and the operational standards that keep applications running reliably. You don’t need to build these yourself, but you need to know what good looks like and be able to hold others to it.
• The technical credibility to lead developers without being one. You can look under the bonnet, challenge an estimate, spot a shortcut being taken, and recognise good work, because you understand what good looks like, even if you’re not the one producing it.
• Experience managing developers across different technical disciplines, you don’t need to be a Proclaim or Salesforce specialist, but you know how to manage people who are.
• A genuine understanding of AI’s role in modern development and a point of view on how to use it well, this isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a core part of what we’re hiring for.
• Proven experience embedding AI into development processes and a clear point of view on where it adds the most value.
• Strong communication skills, you’ll be the bridge between development teams and senior business stakeholders.

Nice-to-haves:

• Familiarity with Proclaim or legal case management systems.
• Experience in a legal, financial services, or other regulated environment.

We reserve the right to close this role before the date specified depending on the calibre and volume of candidates.

About Fletchers Group

Fletchers is a fast-growing, dynamic law firm specialising in personal injury and clinical negligence law, with outstanding rankings in both The Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners. Following several strategic acquisitions, we’ve evolved into the Fletchers Group, with ambitious plans for continued growth and innovation.

We aspire to be the best place to work in the legal sector.

Our workplace culture is inclusive, informal, and supportive, with a strong focus on colleague wellbeing and happiness. We are proud to offer some of the best hybrid and flexible working arrangements in the industry — because we understand that balance drives performance.

At Fletchers, we also value connection and collaboration. We create exciting opportunities for teams to come together and thrive. Whether you’re starting your career or aiming for leadership, you’ll find a clear path to progress and development here — from apprenticeships and professional qualifications to senior roles and Partnership.

We seek out a broad range of challenging, high-quality legal work, enabling our people to build meaningful and progressive careers. And we don’t just talk about development — we invest in it, with a significant proportion of our colleagues working towards relevant qualifications at any given time.

We reward those who help build our success and live our values. Our benefits package is designed to grow with you, offering real opportunities to share in our long-term strength. Our base pay and bonus structure is built to recognise and reward high performance.

Join us and be part of a law firm that’s not only growing, but redefining what it means to work in legal services.

Fletchers Group is an inclusive employer with a diverse workforce: we welcome applications from any and all backgrounds. We’re committed to providing a culture and environment where everyone can thrive, understanding and celebrating that no colleague is the same.We’re proud of our work on the Disability Confident scheme, signed up to BITC's Race at Work charter, and working towards Henpicked's Menopause and Menstrual Friendly accreditations.

Fletchers Group is proud to be a Disability Confident Committed scheme member.

If you do require any support or reasonable adjustments during the process, please contact us.

Southport /Manchester/ Leeds/ Liverpool/ Hybrid

#J-18808-Ljbffr