Hi! We're UW.

We’re on a mission to take the headache out of utilities by providing them all in one place. One bill for energy, broadband, mobile and insurance and a whole lot of savings!

We’re aiming to double in size as we help more people to stop wasting time and money. Big ambitions, to be delivered by people like you.

Got your attention? Read on…

We put people first. It’s all about you..

• We care about how we deliver and who we work with, we enjoy working on interesting problems with smart people and know that if it was easy it wouldn't be fun.
• We deliver quickly by keeping processes light and enabling autonomy.
• We’ve never believed in ivory tower leadership. Our leadership team are hands-on, roll-up their sleeves when needed to mentor and support.
• We encourage experimentation, don’t appreciate egos, believe in debate, collaboration and learning.
• We have 170+ people in Tech, as a team we’re very much backend heavy in terms of engineering fire power but with UX, Product and Data now growing quickly we’re in the right place to push on and hire people who want to very much take ownership of what they are delivering and more importantly how we go about it.
• Our primary backend language is Go, with frontends generally written using React + TypeScript.
• We run everything on Kubernetes spread over multiple clouds and an on prem cluster.
• If it can be open sourced, it shall be.

We deliver progress. What you’ll do and how you will make an impact.

• Drive the engineering vision, strategy and implementation in order to support the business.
• Have line management responsibility across three sizeable teams delivering our Energy and Broadband products, plus the Staff Engineers for the tribe.
• Be a multiplier effect in the organisation, guiding and evangelising great team health and engineering practices.
• Lead the technology strategy for your department, working closely with your product counterparts.
• Guide and approve architectural decisions within your area of responsibility.
• Have the ability to work remotely.

Impact, Output and Outcomes

At UW, Heads of Engineering:

• Play a leadership role in the engineering department where they seek excellence in all engineering disciplines inclusive of quality assurance, application development and infrastructure.
• Ensure their team's processes enable high quality, valuable and productive work at a sustainable pace. They facilitate and lead conversations to evolve the way their department works to ensure continuous high performance. They manage stakeholders expectations in terms of cross team product delivery and estimation.
• Make sure their department has the context they need to make effective decisions and do their best work. For example, this could be ensuring teams understand the "why" behind their goals and deliverables, how their work fits in with UW's goals and OKRs, or raising awareness of what others are working on.
• Have significant impact on the growth of the people in their tribe, ensuring that line managers and their reports develop and hone the skills they need to succeed in their role or progress to the next step on their career path.

Responsibilities

Leadership

• Experience in a senior leadership position responsible for building, motivating and leading one or preferably more high performing development teams.
• Can define and set a vision along with the plan which needs to be implemented to meet the end goal.
• Ability to demonstrate influencing and negotiating skills to align a number of potentially conflicting views with internal and external stakeholders.
• Identify high and low performers, skill gaps, and headcount needs for the department.
• Evaluates situations, takes accountability for decisions, issues, etc. in the short, medium and longer-term.

Engineering and technical

• Experience working with our stack of Go, React, Kubernetes, Terraform and AWS.
• Extensive, demonstrable experience building complex digital products and internal facing systems across web and mobile applications. Experience working in energy or telecoms would be beneficial.
• Passionate about software engineering best practices include agile, TDD, continuous delivery, microservices, event-driven architecture, domain driven design and operability.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment both as an individual contributor and a technical lead.

Delivery

• Able to manage their department’s delivery and workload, and makes sure the department delivers good quality, valuable work at a good and sustainable pace.
• Sets challenging team and individual objectives and trusts people to get on with them.
• Shares clear expectations about required performance levels, rewards success and addresses performance issues quickly and fairly, treats team members with honesty, respect and compassion.
• Challenges systems, processes and people in order to achieve business objectives.

Anti-patterns

• Mostly leads by authority.
• Stays too close to hands-on coding at the detriment of department dynamics, knowledge or skills.
• Their department and engineering team leads burn out or their teams are unmotivated.
• No mid and long term strategic planning around technical projects; big bang delivery or tech only instead of “vertical slices of value”.
• Line reports unhappy, not improving or progressing, “stuck in a rut”

So why pick UW?

We’ve got big ambitions so there’s going to be plenty of challenges. There are also a lot of benefits:

• An industry benchmarked salary. We’ll share it during your first conversation.

• Share Options and a Save as You Earn scheme.

• Fully remote working.

• Discount on our services and you get our coveted Cashback Card for free.

• A matched contribution pension scheme and life assurance up to 4x your salary.

• Family-friendly policies, designed to help you and your family thrive.

• Discounted private health insurance, access to an Employee Assistance line and a free Virtual GP.

• Belonging groups that help UW shape an even more inclusive future.

• A commitment to helping you develop and grow in your role.

Apply here!

You’ve got this far… Hit apply - we can’t wait to hear from you! Worried you don’t hit all the criteria? We welcome applications from diverse and varied backgrounds so get your application in and let’s chat!

Cameron will be your point of contact throughout the recruitment process.