Head of Product Engineering

Job content

About UCAS

UCAS is at the heart of connecting people to higher education.

UCAS is the world’s leading shared admissions service for higher education. We provide application services for UK universities and colleges as well as delivering a wide range of research, consultancy and advisory services to schools, colleges, careers services, professional bodies and employers.

We’re a successful and fast-growing organisation, which helps hundreds of thousands of people every year. We’re committed to delivering a first-class service to all of our customers — they’re at the heart of everything we do.

Digital and Data

The Digital and Data business unit defines and delivers the digital products and services used by students, providers, advisers, and commercial partners, as well as the underlying technology platforms that enable these products to be developed in a responsive and agile way.

Through the development and support of our underpinning data platform the business unit ensures that our data is curated and made available for use both by our analytical reporting and our data products and insights teams.

Working in multi-disciplinary teams comprising customer insight, product managers, architects, developers, testers and data scientists, the Digital and Data business unit ensures that UCAS is a customer centric, product-focused digital business, connecting students with their next opportunity.

About the role

Contractual Hours

35.00 with flexible and remote working options

About the role

The role of Head of Product Engineering leads the product engineering pipeline across UCAS’ software product lines, translating strategic product requirements into software solutions, recommending engineering best practices and assessing feasibility and ramifications of new business requirements. Providing technical vision and direction, you’ll empower UCAS’s product engineering team to build from our ambitious roadmap, to deliver exceptional quality products and services to UCAS customers.

Key accountabilities:

• To provide technical leadership and direction for the development and build of UCAS products and services, advising the business on how best to improve and deliver our products and services through technology.
• To own the product engineering pipeline across all of UCAS’ software product lines, prioritising development efforts and executing these in line with company objectives.
• To ensure that product development is informed by a robust understanding of customer needs and, together with the Head of Product Management resource product delivery according to the agreed engineering pipelines.
• To oversee complex technical projects (build, test and deploy), ensuring technical delivery of the product roadmap by leading multi-disciplinary teams of product owners, business analysts and software developers to build high-quality, innovative, robust software for public release.

Skills, qualifications, and experience

• Has extensive industry experience in an agile product engineering environment, leading on multiple large scale and complex technical projects, including building and deploying large scale web and mobile applications that improve user experience.
• Has proven experience building, evolving and leading a ‘Product’ organisation. Building teams that create and operate software products through a range of sourcing models including insourcing and outsourcing to with 3rd party technology providers.
• Has extensive knowledge of product engineering principles and using them to deliver fast, test-driven product engineering services in order to release products faster to the customer.
• Leads with a passion for product development and empathises with UCAS customers, their requirements and is driven to build products that continually add value to customers’ lives and the technical issues that may prevent this.
• Has proven experience of managing multidisciplinary teams with a focus on delivery of products in a rapidly changing environment and enables fast adoption to changing requirements, even if it comes in the later phase of the product development.
• Substantial experience of building out from and replacing legacy technologies and services
• Extensive experience of leveraging DevOps practices and automation technologies to drive rapid product engineering and deployment and managing a CI/CD pipeline.

Package

Competitive salary plus 30 days annual leave, voluntary flexible benefits, paid volunteering days, and a contributory stakeholder pension. It’s not just about the financial benefits that UCAS offers – on-site you can also benefit from our restaurant, affordable gym membership, flexible ways of working and continued online development and support. You will enjoy an exciting, agile working environment, with a vibrant culture and flexible approach to work, all of which reflects our teamwork and innovative spirit