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

[What the role is]

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.

[What you will be working on]

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 balance 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 rigourously 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.