Director - Engineering & Operations (Digital)

At Burberry, we believe creativity opens spaces. Our purpose is to unlock the power of imagination to push boundaries and open new possibilities for our people, our customers and our communities. This is the core belief that has guided Burberry since it was founded in 1856 and is central to how we operate as a company today.

We aim to provide an environment for creative minds from different backgrounds to thrive, bringing a wide range of skills and experiences to everything we do. As a purposeful, values-driven brand, we are committed to being a force for good in the world as well, creating the next generation of sustainable luxury for customers, driving industry change and championing our communities.

As a senior member of the IT and Digital leadership teams, the Director of Engineering and Operations is responsible for defining, executing, and continuously improving the Engineering and Operations strategy for digital.

This role is highly autonomous and requires a strong and visible leadership presence both within the Engineering team, and across Digital. We work in a matrix structure, so high levels of alignment with partners across, Product, IT, Design, Marketing and other internal functions is key.

To be successful in this role, you should be confident managing our technical teams consisting of both internal and external partners. You will have the responsibility of setting engineering standards, goals, engineering and operations strategies for our Digital estate. We also expect you to manage integrations with external partners and oversee all software development plans from ideation to execution.

The engineering and operations teams are accountable for 4 keys areas: People, Performance & Reliability, Quality and Speed to Market.

• Accountable for engineering strategy and teams, including;
  • Line management of engineering leaders, engineers, dev ops, QA and operations teams, development processes, coding standards and best practices, technology/Language selection, CI/CD pipeline, test strategy and release strategy; work with Dev Ops on infrastructure and environment strategy,
• Empower and enable the engineering leadership, and wider teams to define and implement the appropriate strategies for Digital. Be democratic but have a strong sense of pragmatism and don’t be afraid to make tough decisions when required.
• Work with team to define and evangelize lean & agile ways of working. Supporting teams in understanding the importance of these.
• Actively engage with and promote the implementation of open-source principles and values
• Promote an open culture of collaboration, balancing the need to foster healthy debate whilst also providing clear direction and unlocks.
• Act as the trusted engineering leader and partner to product, program and project stakeholders (i.e. Solution Architects, Design), and the wider digital leadership team; i.e. collaboration, decision making, escalation process and execution.
• Operate as a ‘servant-leader’ to the engineering leadership teams
• Continue to iterate and optimize the recruitment process, ensuring that we can identify, hire and retain top talent.

The role of the Director of Engineering requires a combination of strong technical skills, excellent communication skills, and the ability to influence both technical and non-technical partners and stakeholders.

As such, you will need the following:

• A track record of leading and managing large, distributed engineering teams within a hybrid partner model.
• Extensive experience working within a matrix structure at a global e-commerce organisation.
• Experience in the procurement and integration of partners, focused on leveraging and structuring partner engagements to get the most of out of them.
• Proven experience implementing / rearchitecting engineering processes to leverage the benefits of lean & agile delivery.
• An understanding of micro-services and microservice strategy (including MACH)
• Experience owning and delivering across distributed front end ecommerce teams (ideally in React, but not essential) as well as an understanding of Design Systems and micro front end architecture.
• Be a champion of Burberry Engineering and Digital outside of the business, attend meetups, conference and help build Burberry’s profile as a destination for top engineering talent
• Proven experience and understanding of end-to-end eCommerce architecture
• Experience of building an internal development team is also desired