Deputy Director, Engineering Management, Ministry Of Digital Development & Information

Director/Deputy Director

As Director/Deputy Director, you extend your leadership across multiple squads executing across multiple delivery threads (as manager of managers or across workstreams through tech leads) or a broader product (or infra) area, ensuring alignment, consistency, and impact across teams. You oversee multiple squads (including internal staff and/or vendor teams) by setting a unified technical vision and enforcing multi-squad standards that drive measurable impact. Your responsibilities include coaching EMs and Tech Leads, fostering cross-squad collaboration, and ensuring that your leadership structure remains lean and focused. You are accountable for delivering consistent outcomes and high-quality solutions by balancing innovative initiatives with essential BAU improvements, making strategic decisions that always benefit the organisation's long-term objectives.

Role and Responsibilities (not exhaustive):

• Establish a unified architectural vision and technical standards that meets organisational requirements.
• Set rigorous expectations for security, scalability, and advanced DevOps/SRE practices across squads.
• Define and champion platform-wide architecture, tools, and practices that improve org-wide scalability, security, and velocity.
• Ensure systems are sustainable, cost-effective, and adaptable to future needs.
• Oversee design reviews and drive large-scale initiatives (e.g., major refactoring, system migrations) that yield quantifiable improvements.
• Ensure that both innovative features and BAU work (tech debt reduction, bug fixes) contribute to efficiency gains and system reliability.
• Oversee modernisation efforts or major platform migrations within your area of responsibility.
• Balance innovation with operational excellence, reducing tech debt and delivery friction.

Ownership and Accountabilities:

• Own multi-squad outcomes by setting clear, measurable targets that support the organisation's long-term strategy.
• Foster a culture of strong accountability where every deliverable meaningfully contributes to the organisation's goals.
• Drive engineering outcomes at scale — through delegation, system design, and strategic decisions.
• Establish a culture of strong ownership where every decision balances organisational benefit, delivery needs, and long-term sustainability.
• Coach and develop EMs and Tech Leads to enhance their leadership and technical capabilities.
• Delegate responsibilities effectively, assigning leaders to high-impact opportunities.
• Identify skill gaps to ensure the right expertise is in place for successful delivery, restructuring teams as needed.
• Develop senior leaders to operate autonomously across teams.
• Shape org structures in collaboration with your leads to align talent with opportunity and enable sustainable delivery.
• Swiftly remove blockers and refine processes to enable sustained delivery and measurable impact across squads.
• Make strategic decisions that yield sustainable, quantifiable benefits for the organisation.
• Deliver high-impact outcomes across divisions by swiftly removing blockers and strengthening systems.
• Exercise decision-making authority with transparency and empathy, ensuring choices reflect the organisation's values and serve long-term outcomes.

Strategic Alignment:

• Clearly articulate how each squad's work contributes to the organisation's long-term strategy.
• Set strategic objectives that integrate immediate needs with multi-year goals.
• Shape/Contribute to a multi-year engineering direction within your domain that aligns with programme or organisational goals.
• Make strategic trade-offs visible and align investments with public-sector impact.
• Drive data-driven decisions that avoid short-term fixes and yield scalable, transformative impact.
• Communicate clearly and influence senior stakeholders across functions to align on priorities, trade-offs, and long-term investments.
• Drive long-range plans for systems and people development, and rigorously measure the outcomes.
• Champion security, interoperability, and scalability in decision-making.

Cultural and Organisational Influence:

• Serve as a strategic ambassador for the organisation's engineering standards, setting a vision for a lean, high-performing organizational culture.
• Establish high expectations for transparency, accountability, and agility across divisions.
• Build high-trust, inclusive engineering cultures at scale by modeling leadership values and aligning systems to sustain them.
• Set and reinforce engineering standards, transparency, and accountability across your domain.
• Partner with senior leaders to promote a high-trust, inclusive culture within and across your teams.
• Support EMs in reinforcing leadership expectations and accountability norms.
• Identify emerging skill gaps and work with senior stakeholders to evolve team structure for agility and clarity of ownership.
• Contribute to strategic hiring initiatives to strengthen your area's leadership pipeline and promote internal career mobility.
• Coach EMs and Tech Leads to lead autonomously and uphold high delivery standards.
• Drive strategic hiring aligned with future team direction and gaps.
• Lead succession planning by identifying high-potential leaders and preparing them to take on greater scope.
• Continuously reshape teams to improve agility, clarity of ownership, and cross-squad mobility.
• Delegate effectively to EMs and Tech Leads, enabling them to take ownership of outcomes and scale their impact.
• Share team-level learnings and operational improvements across relevant squads or programme areas.
• Build a resilient, high-performing leadership team that delivers strategic outcomes reliably.
• Influence organisational engineering culture and technical policy across functions.
• Support transparent and fair performance management across your domain.
• Partner with senior stakeholders across organisations to align priorities and secure resourcing or policy support.

What We Are Looking For:

• Experienced across the full product lifecycle — comfortable with problem framing, rapid experiments, POC/POV learning loops, and scaling systems into secure, reliable, maintainable services.
• Technically credible — has coded, built, or designed production systems and can discuss implementation trade-offs with confidence.
• Practical product-delivery mindset — knows when to optimise for speed, when to simplify, and when to invest in architecture, reliability, and interoperability as systems evolve.
• Cross-practice collaborator — partners naturally with Product and Design to make good decisions together.
• Clear communicator — can explain technical options and risks to Ministry CIOs, business owners, and engineers alike.
• Outcome-oriented — focuses teams on the real-world impact of the work, ensuring decisions link to user value, organisational goals, and public good.
• Trusted advisor — earns confidence through sound judgment, not hierarchy.
• Ecosystem thinker — balances the needs of individual product teams with Ministry-wide alignment, reusability, and capability growth.
• Secure and reliable by design — incorporates these principles early, not after delivery.
• Curious and evolving — keeps up with modern practices like AI-assisted development and platform automation.