Digital Engineering Director - Preston

Role Purpose
The Group Digital Engineering Director is accountable for building and leading a high-performing, scalable Digital Engineering function that delivers reliable, high-quality digital platforms and products.
The role ensures that engineering capability, standards and delivery discipline underpin the growth ambitions, while enabling strong platform adoption across the business.

Scope of Responsibility
The GDED has accountability for the Digital Engineering function, including:
* Product & Platform Engineering
* Engineering Delivery (software, QA, DevOps, release discipline)
* Data Engineering and analytics platforms
* Digital Labs and R&D

The role leads through senior Heads-of and is responsible for engineering outcomes across multiple platforms and regions.

Key Responsibilities
* Provide strategic leadership to the Digital Engineering function
* Establish and maintain engineering standards, patterns and guardrails
* Ensure predictable, high-quality delivery of digital platforms and products
* Drive platform consistency, reuse and long-term sustainability
* Act as senior advocate for Digital platforms across the business
* Translate business needs into coherent engineering direction
* Build, lead and develop senior engineering leaders
* Partner closely with Digital Transformation and Digital Technology peers
* Support international expansion through scalable engineering approaches

What Success Looks Like
* Engineering delivery is predictable, transparent and trusted
* Platforms are stable, extensible and widely adopted
* Engineering quality issues are identified and addressed early
* Clear ownership and accountability exists across engineering domains
* Reduced dependency on the CDO for engineering arbitration

The successful candidate will have held senior leadership roles with accountability for complex, technology-enabled delivery environments, where engineering capability, platform adoption and organisational change were critical to success.

This may include experience:

* Leading multi-disciplinary engineering, digital or platform teams through senior leaders

* Operating in technology-enabled operational or asset-heavy environments

* Owning or influencing engineering standards, delivery quality and long-term sustainability

* Driving adoption of platforms, products or digital capabilities across a diverse business

* Translating between technical teams and senior business stakeholders

The role requires 5 days on site per week and is paying circa £140k + car + bonus + benefits.