Solutions Engineering Manager

Key Responsibilities

Practice Strategy and Service Management

• Define and maintain the solution engineering practice strategy, operating model, service definition, and multiyear roadmap.
• Manage the practice as an internal service with defined customers, engagement models, adoption targets, and success measures.
• Translate business and technology demand into a prioritised, resourced delivery plan.
• Establish the practice's position in the delivery lifecycle and its interfaces with architecture, platform teams, and operations.
• Maintain a transparent backlog and communicate priorities, capacity, and trade-offs to stakeholders.

Demand Intake and Engagement

• Own the demand intake process, including qualification, sizing, prioritisation, and acceptance criteria for engagements.
• Establish a clear front door for business functions seeking technical solutions, with predictable response and triage.
• Define and operate engagement models spanning advisory, assisted delivery, and full end-to-end solution delivery.

Solution Design Standards and Technical Governance

• Own solution design standards, design documentation templates, architecture decision records, and non-functional requirement baselines.
• Establish and run design review and technical assurance processes proportionate to solution risk and reach.
• Ensure solutions favour approved platform capabilities, golden paths, and reference architectures over bespoke build.
• Set the bar for technical quality, and hold the team to it through review, feedback, and correction.

Reusable Patterns and Capability Building

• Build and curate a library of reusable solution patterns, modules, reference implementations, and accelerators.
• Measure and drive reuse, actively reducing repeated bespoke solutions to the same problem.
• Identify recurring demand that should become a productised platform capability, and make the case to the relevant platform team.
• Embed AI-assisted engineering into the team's working methods, with appropriate review and quality controls.

Delivery Quality and Assurance

• Own the quality, timeliness, and cost of solutions delivered by the practice.
• Ensure every solution meets operational readiness criteria before production release, including monitoring, runbooks, and support arrangements.
• Track and reduce defects, rework, post-implementation incidents, and unplanned support burden.

Governance, Security, and Risk

• Embed security, compliance, and data-protection requirements into the practice's design and delivery standards.
• Partner with Cybersecurity, Architecture, Risk, Quality, and Compliance teams to maintain approved patterns.
• Ensure designs use approved identity, secrets, and certificate services, including Entra ID, HashiCorp Vault, and CyberArk.
• Track and manage technical debt, design exceptions, unsupported solutions, and remediation commitments.

Financial and Vendor Management

• Manage practice budgets, forecasts, resourcing, and cost-optimisation initiatives.
• Evaluate the total cost of ownership of delivered solutions, including support and lifecycle effort, not just build cost.
• Manage delivery partners and contract resources, including performance measures and contractual commitments.

Leadership and Stakeholder Management

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of solution engineers spanning junior and experienced levels.
• Build team capability through workforce planning, clear accountabilities, structured development paths, and certification.
• Manage performance, career progression, and the progression of engineers between levels.
• Build strong relationships with business function leaders, platform managers, architecture, cybersecurity, and operations leaders.
• Facilitate decisions across teams with competing requirements and priorities.
• Communicate practice performance, risks, roadmap progress, and investment needs to senior leadership.

Qualifications

Required

• Significant experience in solution engineering, platform engineering, technical delivery, or solution architecture, typically ten or more years, including at least four years leading teams.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical delivery across multiple technology domains at enterprise scale.
• Strong technical breadth across cloud platforms, integration and APIs, automation, containers, and hosting.
• Proven experience establishing design standards, technical assurance, and delivery quality practices.
• Experience managing roadmaps, service portfolios, technical debt, and technology lifecycles.
• Experience integrating security, compliance, and governance controls into design and delivery workflows.
• Proven ability to lead distributed, cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to develop engineers and grow technical capability within a team.
• Strong financial, vendor-management, communication, and organisational skills.

Preferred

• Experience operating a solution engineering or technical consulting practice in a global, regulated enterprise.
• Hands-on background in cloud, integration, automation, or hosting engineering, retained credibly into leadership.
• Experience with GitHub, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Backstage, and modern delivery toolchains.
• Experience with observability platforms including Datadog, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Cribl, or Observe.
• Familiarity with platform-product management, internal developer platforms, and golden-path delivery models.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering and its practical adoption within delivery teams.
• Experience working within a validated, GxP, or otherwise regulated environment, including data-protection obligations such as GDPR.
• Certifications such as AWS or Azure professional level, TOGAF or an architecture qualification, ITIL, or an agile or product-management qualification.
• A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information technology, or a related discipline.

Leadership Competencies

• Customer-focused and outcome-oriented mindset
• Strategic thinking with strong delivery discipline
• Strong technical judgement and architectural awareness
• Ability to balance standardisation with pragmatic delivery
• Genuine commitment to developing people
• Clear executive communication and stakeholder influence
• Financial and commercial awareness
• Bias toward reuse, simplification, and measurable outcomes

Measures of Success

• Solutions delivered to agreed scope, quality, cost, and timeline
• Increased reuse of approved patterns and platform capabilities
• Reduced proportion of bespoke build relative to platform consumption
• Reduced lead time from demand intake to delivered solution
• Reduced defects, rework, and post-implementation incidents
• Improved supportability and reduced unplanned support burden of delivered solutions
• Stakeholder satisfaction and repeat demand from business functions
• Reduced security findings and audit exceptions in delivered solutions
• Measurable growth in team capability, certification, and progression between levels
• Recurring demand successfully converted into productised platform capabilities

Pursue progress, discover extraordinary

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