Head of Engineering - Quilter

About the Business

Quilter plc is a leading wealth management business, helping to enable brighter financial futures for every generation. Quilter oversees £141.9 billion in customer investments (as of March 2026). It has an adviser and customer offering spanning financial advice, investment platforms, multi-asset investment solutions, and discretionary fund management. The business is comprised of two segments: Affluent and High Net Worth.

Affluent encompasses the financial planning business, Quilter Financial Planning, the Quilter Investment Platform and Quilter Investors, the multi-asset investment solutions business. High Net Worth includes the discretionary fund management business, Quilter Cheviot, together with Quilter Cheviot Financial Planning - offering a highly personalised service to private clients, charities, trustees, and professional partners. Quilter Cheviot has presence throughout the UK, Ireland and Channel Islands.

At Quilter we never stand still. Our foundations are rooted in our extraordinary expertise, which is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers, but we have great ambitions to stay one step ahead and make an even greater difference to the people and communities we serve, including our colleagues.

Our business is transforming, continually modernising, and becoming even more customer centric. So, if you want to be bold in the pursuit of your ambitions, bring new ideas, and challenge and evolve what we do, it's the perfect time to join us!

About the Role

As the Head of Engineering, you will be the enterprise owner of the engineering capability. The role is accountable for ensuring that the organisation's technology platforms, regardless of buy or built are delivered to a consistently high engineering standard that is defined and governed within the engineering practice.

You will report to the CTDO and act as a senior technology partner to business, product, change, architecture, infrastructure, information security, data, operations and third-party delivery partners. The role requires strong functional and technical leadership, and stakeholder influence across a regulated environment

The role is required to build the quality engineering practice, DevSecOps enablement, engineering standards, tooling, career frameworks and the safe adoption of AI-assisted software delivery.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the engineering strategy aligned to business, technology and product priorities
• Establish the engineering operating model, including team struc#
• tures, accountabilities, ways of working and decision rights aligned with the broader ways of working for Quilter
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering teams and ensure appropriate engineering governance that is light touch and ensures execution at pace is not compromised.
• Maintain awareness of emerging technology and engineering trends and translate to meaningful and purposeful conversations and initiatives that drive business value
• Build and lead a high-performing Engineering organisation, creating a culture of technical excellence, accountability, innovation, continuous improvement and customer focus.
• Define and evolve Quilter's engineering strategy, ensuring engineering investments, capabilities and practices support business priorities, customer outcomes and long-term technology goals.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering standards covering software design, coding, quality engineering, integration, deployment and production stability. Lead the evolution of engineering enablement capabilities, including platform engineering, developer tooling, automation and self-service engineering services, reducing friction and improving the effectiveness of software delivery teams.
• Continuously improve developer experience (DevEx) by providing engineers with the tools, environments, processes and support required to build, test, deploy and operate software efficiently and safely. Use DORA or complimentary engineering metrics to understand delivery performance and engineering productivity.
• Establish and evolve the platform engineering capability that enables engineering teams to build, test, deploy and operate software through self service or SDK (self development kit)
• Partner with Enterprise and Solution Architecture to ensure engineering decisions support the organisation's target architecture by attending ARB and ensuring that architectural decisions are cascaded to the engineering communities. Promote modular, API and event driven architectures.
• Drive the evolution of Quality Engineering, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle through automation, performance engineering, test data management, production feedback loops and shared accountability for quality outcomes. Establish quality gates and automated controls throughout the software development life cycle.
• Define and lead the organisation's strategy for AI assisted software engineering. Enable engineers to safely use AI coding assistants. Establish appropriate governance for AI generated code.
• Develop engineering practices that move teams from AI coding assistants towards effective human + AI workflows
• Drive modern software engineering practices by owning and continuously enhance DevSecOps capabilities, including CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as a code, API first development and secure software development.
• Build a culture of small, frequent, safe releases rather than large, high risk release deployments
• Embed security throughout the engineering lifecycle, implement automated security controls within CI/CD pipelines including code scanning and vulnerability management. Establish secure coding practices and engineering security standards. Work with the cyber security team to implement security policies and practices.
• Establish clear engineering accountability with you build it you run concept
• Balance internal and external delivery capabilities, ensuring the organisation has the right mix of skills, capacity, succession planning and commercial oversight to meet evolving business demand.
• Lead the engineering profession across Quilter, including engineering communities, career frameworks, capability development, technical leadership, coaching and succession planning.
• Manage technology, delivery and operational risks through proportionate governance, assurance and evidence-based decision-making, enabling teams to deliver at pace while maintaining appropriate controls.
• Act as a senior technology leader and trusted adviser, translating complex engineering challenges into clear business implications, options and recommendations for senior stakeholders.Lead organisation