Head of Engineering Velocity

Building the Fastest Digital Product Engineering Capability in Banking Executive-Level Contributor Role Role Overview We are seeking an exceptional leader to drive: making speed our strategic weapon . This role will own end-to-end engineering velocity—from idea to production—across our entire digital product organisation. You will eliminate the waste (high) in our deployment pipeline, reduce our multi-day lead time to hours, and build one of the fastest, most efficient digital product engineering teams in banking. This is not a traditional management role. You will be a hands‑on architect of organisational and technical systems , working at the intersection of engineering excellence, organisational design, and cultural transformation. You will eat, sleep, and breathe deployment velocity, developer experience, and flow efficiency. The Mission Transform our product and engineering organisation to enable multiple deployments per day—safely, reliably, and at scale—with a lead time for change measured in hours. In our world where everything is digital, our speed from idea to business value is our primary competitive weapon. Your mandate is to fix this and keep iterating until we are the best. Key Responsibilities Eliminate Deployment Pipeline Waste Architect for Flow Across 56+ PODs Enable Platform Teams for Maximum Impact Prepare for AI Agent Deployment at Scale Own Velocity Metrics End-to-End Define, instrument, and drive metrics across all 56+ PODs Build real‑time dashboards showing flow efficiency, bottlenecks, and trends Establish speed as a first‑class KPI Report directly to Group COO on velocity improvements and blockers Reduce the wait time by automating manual confirmations, approvals, and handoffs Design and implement progressive rollout strategies with automated rollback Build automated testing frameworks that eliminate hours of manual test confirmation Work with Control functions to shift left into the pipeline Understand dependencies across PODs Identify and eliminate coordination bottlenecks between PODs Design self‑service platform capabilities to reduce dependency on PODs Transform CAB approval process from manual gate to automated guardrails Establish risk‑based deployment strategies (not all changes need same approval rigor) Partner with Pipeline & DevEx POD to build world‑class deployment automation Work with Testing Automation POD to create comprehensive, fast, reliable test suites Collaborate with Platform & Cloud POD on infrastructure‑as‑code and ephemeral environments Guide Incident Management POD toward predictive alerting and auto‑remediation Ensure platform investments directly reduce deployment lead time Recognize that AI agents are software workers requiring rapid iteration Design deployment pipelines that support rapid deployment frequency Ensure infrastructure can handle multiple deployments per day across all PODs Build observability and rollback capabilities for AI agent updates Requirements Essential Experience 10+ years in software engineering and DevOps with deep hands‑on technical expertise Experience in MLOps and awareness of LLMOps Proven track record of reducing deployment lead time in complex organisations Experience working in organisations with 500+ engineers across multiple teams/PODs and Geographies Deep understanding of flow and velocity metrics, Team Topologies, and flow efficiency Hands‑on experience with modern CI/CD and MLflow tools Expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS), containers and IaC Experience building observability and monitoring systems Highly Valued Experience Banking, fintech, or highly regulated industry experience Led DevOps transformation in organisation that achieved elite metrics Built or scaled platform engineering teams Experience with microservices architectures and event‑driven systems Knowledge of compliance automation and shift‑left security practices Awareness in SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) principles Required Skills & Competencies Systems thinking: Ability to see the entire value stream and identify constraint points Data‑driven decision making: Obsessive about metrics, measurement, and continuous improvement Influence without authority: Can drive change across 56+ PODs without direct reporting lines Executive communication: Can present complex technical concepts to C‑suite audiences Bias toward action: Moves fast, experiments, learns, iterates Technical credibility: Engineers respect you because you've done the work Cultural sensitivity: Can work with traditional banking functions (Compliance, Risk, Legal) Relentless focus: This is not a side project—you live and breathe velocity Benefits This is a once‑in‑a‑career opportunity to: Transform an entire banking organisation's approach to software delivery Have executive‑level visibility and influence without traditional management overhead Work at the bleeding edge of DevOps, MLOps and LLMOps excellence in a complex, regulated environment Build systems that will power AI agent deployment at unprecedented scale Directly impact customer experience through faster product iterations Make speed a strategic weapon and competitive advantage Establish yourself as a thought leader in banking DevOps, MLOps /and LLMOps transformation If you are energized by the challenge of taking a deployment cycle to