Head of Product Engineering

About the role

The principal objectives of this role are to manage the day-to-day product engineering activity of the Pepper Advantage Technology Division teams in the UK, Spain, India and other jurisdictions.

Working closely with the Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer, the HOPE will ensure that tactical and strategic objectives are clearly defined, understood and delivered for our proprietary technology platform, Prism. You will build and lead a world-class product engineering organization that consistently ships secure, reliable, and measurable business value. Establish a culture of craftsmanship and automation—driving high deployment frequency, low change failure rate, short lead time, and fast MTTR—while meeting regulatory obligations and ensuring operational resilience.

Location: London (UK), Madrid (Spain) or Dublin (Ireland)

Main Responsibilities

• A key contributor to the ongoing design and build of Prism Credit Management product, set team objectives and strategies focusing on Agile processes, continuous improvement and data-led delivery.
• Lead and mature the product engineering squads in the Credit Management product area and transition the team and processes over time from building product to running product service support.
• Hire, develop, mentor and retain top talent against the established engineering career paths.
• Partner with Product colleagues to align delivery roadmap to strategy/OKRs, ensuring predictable delivery and outcomes.
• Partner with the Solution Design and Platform Engineering teams to evolve to scalable, secure, observable architectures (APIs, microservices, event-driven, domain-driven design).
• Institutionalize modern delivery practices on the engineering practices and route-to-Live delivery and drive metrics-led improvement using DORA + cost-to-serve.
• Own CI/CD strategy (pipeline standardization, policy as code, quality gates, security scanning) and implement test automation at all levels.
• Embed DevSecOps and SRE practices across the Engineering team: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, post-mortems, capacity & resiliency engineering.
• Communicate credibly with execs, boards, auditors and customers about engineering risk, resilience, and delivery.
• Ensure compliance with data and IT security and country specific regulations.

Competencies

• Demonstrated leadership ability, team management, and interpersonal skills.
• Change leadership—drives adoption of new ways of working, collaboration, continuous improvement with high levels of trust and autonomy.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, including the capability and gravitas to operate execs, engineers, and regulators/auditors.
• Client/Customer-centric mindset; measurable impact on revenue, activation, retention, and cost-to-serve.
• Ability to create a positive and collaborative climate in which people want to do their best by providing appropriate challenge, support and direction.

Your skills

• Minimum 10 years’ experience in delivering fast paced and agile system Engineering ideally in regulated FinTech or payments/banking/wealth.
• Built/led engineering orgs of 20+ across multiple parallel product lines, within a microservices architecture and Cloud-native context (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Engineering excellence leader with deep SDLC mastery with a pragmatic implementation approach to architecture, platform and tooling.
• Embedded DevSecOps and automated policy and quality controls in delivery pipelines, ideally with Azure DevOps.
• Extensive change management experience and evidential metrics-based delivery capability.
• Standardised logging/metrics/tracing (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana); built comprehensive dashboards and runbooks.
• Owned Service reliability: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, chaos experiments, game days, incident command.

Nice-to-Haves

• Mortgage origination and servicing, Payments, core banking, or lending domain expertise.
• Production experience with Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), service meshes, and GitOps (Argo CD/Flux).
• Navigated PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR; partnered with Risk/Compliance and auditors and delivered audit-ready evidence.
• Privacy engineering (GDPR, data residency)
• Experience leading across multiple geographies/time zones.

Key success indicators

• DORA: Lead time, Deployment frequency, Change failure rate, MTTR.
• Reliability: SLO attainment (%), incident rate and severity mix, mean time to detect (MTTD).
• Quality: Escaped defects, defect density, automated test coverage, flaky test rate.
• Security/Compliance: Vulnerability SLA adherence, audit/control pass rate.
• Delivery & Product: Roadmap predictability, value throughput (e.g., OKR progress), time-to-market.
• Classification : Confidential
• People & Culture: eNPS, attrition of regrettable talent, internal mobility, DEI indicators.
• Cost & Efficiency: Cloud unit economics, cost-to-serve, build time, onboarding time to first PR.

Pepper’s values and culture

Our mission is to help people succeed. Our clients, our customers, our employees. Our Values are ‘Can do’, ‘Balanced’ and ‘Real’.

Pepper Advantage’s values support our vision, shape our culture and define how we interact with other employees and the attitudes we adopt towards our customers and clients. The values of Pepper Advantage support the organisation’s mission statement.

Pepper Advantage’s unique outcome focused corporate culture aims to deliver fairness and value for clients and customers, consistently exceeding expectations in all measurable performance areas.

Pepper Advantage is an equal opportunities employer.

Role Profiles are subject to change in line with business needs.