Head of Engineering - Business Systems

Head of Engineering - Business Systems

Endava

Bucharest, Romania

Job Description

As a Head of Engineering at Endava, you will provide cohesive engineering leadership across Endava's internally-focused business systems, supporting the wider Endava organisation (People, Growth, Finance) and enabling teams (e.g., Integrations & Data, Enterprise, AI & Automation). You will raise engineering capability and consistency by championing high standards, quality, reliability, and team health so that Product strategy can be delivered predictably.

Reporting Line

• Reports to: SVP of Product Management (Application Management and Development);
• Directly career-coaches discipline leads (e.g., Engineering, QA/Automation, DevOps/SRE) and supports Tech Leads/Engineering Leads through coaching and community leadership;
• People leadership model: this role is a career coach and discipline leader to start with, not the primary day-to-day line manager for delivery teams.

Core Responsibilities

Talent & Growth

• Coach and develop engineering leadership (e.g., Tech Leads/Engineering Leads, Solutions Architects, Senior Engineers) through clear career paths, mentoring, and skills development;
• Identify systemic capability gaps and run targeted uplift initiatives (coaching, training, hiring support);
• Support hiring outcomes by shaping role profiles, participating in interviews, and helping onboard talent;
• Partner with Delivery Managers to improve resourcing effectiveness, match capability to priorities, and reduce single points of failure.

Technical Excellence

• Define and evolve a lightweight Business Systems Engineering Handbook with standards and guardrails (coding conventions, code review, branching, CI/CD quality gates, security in SDLC);
• Drive a deliberate technical debt approach: create visibility, prioritisation, and sustained burn-down tied to measurable outcomes;
• Ensure consistent platform and integration engineering practices across domains;
• Promote practical adoption of AI across engineering workflows and Endava's internally-focused business systems where it improves quality, speed, and reliability;
• Partner with Product Management (Product Owners and Business Analysts) and Delivery Managers to surface technical risks, dependencies, and constraints early.

Quality & Reliability

• Own the quality strategy and levels of test automation appropriate to each domain or team;
• Drive SRE fundamentals: reliability targets, incident management, and post-incident learning;
• Improve consistency of release standards, testing coverage, and operability across teams.

Ways of Working

• Promote consistent DevOps and release practices across teams: incremental delivery, trunk-based flow where feasible, automated quality gates;
• Strengthen documentation culture and knowledge sharing through engineering runbooks, ADRs, and onboarding guides;
• Guide and monitor the Definitions of Ready and Done in partnership with Product Management;
• Align engineering practices with Endava frameworks (e.g., TEAM, TEAS, Dava.Flow) and drive pragmatic adoption so teams operate consistently and perform at a high level.

Governance & Collaboration

• Be the engineering counterpart to Product leadership, clarify decision rights, ensure technical risks/constraints are visible, and keep engineering execution healthy;
• Act as a key stakeholder in EA-led design governance: ensure solutions are buildable, supportable, and consistent;
• Maintain a clear engagement model to minimise overlap:
  • Delivery Managers own roadmap, scope, delivery outcomes, and budgets;
  • Head of Engineering owns engineering standards, capability, quality/reliability, and technical execution health.

Qualifications

Required Experience

Essential

• Strong engineering fundamentals and experience with application architecture, integration patterns, data platforms, DevOps toolchains, and business intelligence tooling (e.g., PowerBI);
• In-depth knowledge of modern technology stacks: experience with two or more of ServiceNow, Oracle Finance and HCM, Dynamics/CRM, Java/.NET, integration patterns, data platforms;
• Experience setting and improving engineering standards and practices across CI/CD, security in SDLC, testing, and operability;
• Proven people leadership through coaching and capability uplift across multiple teams.

Desirable

• Working knowledge of AI fundamentals and modern practices: able to spot practical use cases and drive adoption in systems and engineering workflows.

Required Profile

• Direct, transparent, and assertive leadership style;
• Decision maker and facilitator with a high engineering bar, clear accountability, and healthy collaboration with Product and EA;
• Strong written and verbal communicator who can simplify complexity for diverse audiences.