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.

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 organization’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 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 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 organisational culture.
• Establish high expectations for transparency, accountability, and agility across divisions.
• Build high‑trust, inclusive engineering cultures at scale by modelling 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.