Director of Software Engineering

Technical Glasgow, Scotland


Description

Do you want to work to make Power for Good?

We're the world's largest independent renewable energy company. We're driven by a simple yet powerful vision: to create a future where everyone has access to affordable, zero carbon energy.

We know that achieving our ambitions would be impossible without our people. Because we're tackling some of the world's toughest problems, we need the very best people to help us. They're our most important asset so that's why we continually invest in them.

RES is a family with a diverse workforce, and we are dedicated to the personal professional growth of our people, no matter what stage of their career they're at. We can promise you rewarding work which makes a real impact, the chance to learn from inspiring colleagues from across a growing, global network and opportunities to grow personally and professionally.

Our competitive package offers rewards and benefits including pension schemes, flexible working, and top-down emphasis on better work-life balance. We also offer private healthcare, discounted green travel, 25 days holiday with options to buy/sell days, enhanced family leave and four volunteering days per year so you can make a difference somewhere else.

The Position

The Director of Software Engineering reports to the Senior Vice President of Product. This role drives technical strategy, fosters cross-functional collaboration, and delivers secure, scalable SaaS B2B industrial data analytics solutions. Embracing our vision of a zero-carbon future and our mission to innovate for cost reduction, value creation, and sustainable growth, this role ensures engineering efforts align with our core values of passion, accountability, collaboration, and excellence. Our culture encourages doing what is right for all stakeholders, turning challenges into opportunities, measuring impact pragmatically, and championing inclusivity for both teams and products.

 

We value leaders who create balanced, equitable environments and are committed to supporting the growth and success of women in engineering roles. We strongly encourage women and underrepresented individuals to apply, and we seek a director who will champion an inclusive hiring strategy across all their globally diverse teams.

 

The engineering team is a distributed team across Spain, UK and Canada, and thus would require a suitable candidate to be able to work with team across these regions both remotely and via travel.

 

Key Accountabilities

Strategic Technology

  • Establish and communicate a clear, forward-looking vision for engineering activities, aligned with business goals and evolving industry trends.
  • Shape the long-term software engineering strategy, enabling the adoption of innovative technologies (e.g., AI/ML, edge computing, GenAI) while empowering the team to execute detailed technical architecture.

Engineering Excellence

  • Foster a culture of technical excellence, ensuring high standards in secure, reliable, and scalable engineering practices.
  • Enable the team to deliver high-quality solutions by promoting agile practices, data-driven decision-making, and continuous improvement.

Customer-Centric Leadership

  • Set the direction for delivering innovative and scalable solutions that address customer challenges and align with Product Management priorities.
  • Guide teams in embedding customer-centric principles into the engineering processes and deliverables so the products align with design and customer needs.
  • Team Leadership and Growth
  • Build, inspire, and grow a globally distributed, high-performing engineering team.
  • Oversee recruitment, mentoring, and professional development across key engineering disciplines (e.g., platform engineering, data engineering, ML engineering).
  • Foster an inclusive, collaborative, and innovative culture that supports team growth and development.
  • Support the inclusion of new teams into the organisation.

Collaboration

  • Partner closely with product and design teams to align strategic goals, balancing user needs, market opportunities, and technical feasibility. 
  • Provide teams with the tools, infrastructure, and operational support needed for cross-functional collaboration and delivery, including facilitating rapid decision making.

Resource Allocation

  • Oversee the effective allocation of engineering resources to align with organizational priorities and cross-functional objectives. Ensure the right balance of skills, expertise, and capacity across projects and teams to meet delivery timelines and business goals.
  • Continuously assess team capacity and forecast future resource needs based on project pipelines, scaling plans, and evolving organizational objectives.
  • Reallocate resources dynamically to address shifting priorities, bottlenecks, or critical business needs, ensuring engineering efforts remain efficient and focused.

Design Alignment

  • Ensure design principles are embedded in engineering workflows to enhance product usability and user experience.
  • Promote seamless collaboration between engineering and design teams to deliver user-centered solutions.

Innovation & Enablement

  • Drive the evaluation and strategic adoption of emerging technologies for edge and cloud computing, setting a framework for the team to experiment and implement cutting-edge solutions.
  • Champion a future-ready mindset, anticipating shifts in technology to maintain scalable, adaptable solutions.

Compliance

  • Provide oversight to ensure all engineering initiatives adhere to data governance, security, and regulatory standards (e.g., ISO27K, GDPR, CCPA).
  • Support the team in building secure, compliant, and scalable systems without dictating the technical implementation details.

Knowledge

  • Deep understanding of distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
  • Familiarity with industrial data pipelines and security protocols, and typical challenges.
  • Knowledge of AI/ML for data analytics and decision-making.
  • Knowledge of multi/hybrid-cloud strategies.
  • Understanding of standard scalable architectural patterns.
  • Proficiency in agile product development and DevOps practices.
  • Awareness of renewable energy sector data trends (preferred).
  • Understanding of UX principles and design thinking.
  • Familiarity with frameworks for measuring impact and performance.
  • Insight into edge computing concepts for real-time analytics.
  • Understanding of data governance and regulatory considerations.

Skills

  • Engineering Vision: Ability to establish and guide a software engineering vision aligned with product development goals.
  • Collaboration: Foster open dialogue among engineering, product, and design teams.
  • Communication: Express ideas clearly and inclusively at all levels.
  • Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills to resolve complex technical and organizational challenges.
  • Agile Management: Adapt team resources to meet dynamic priorities.
  • Data-Driven Approach: Use metrics and analytics for informed decisions.
  • Pragmatic Execution: Balance ambitious innovation with timelines and budgets.
  • Mentorship: Inspire engineering team members through coaching, feedback, and professional development.
  • Conflict Resolution: Facilitate constructive discussions that maintain trust and progress demonstrating technical mediation skills for resolving disagreements over architecture, implementation, or timelines, combined with strong leadership abilities to maintain team morale during conflict resolution.
  • Data: Deep understanding of data governance frameworks and compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
  • Security: Expertise in secure system design, including data encryption, access control, and monitoring.

Experience

  • Proven leadership of SaaS B2B engineering teams at scale, with 6+ years experiences
  • Hands-on background in leading technology evaluations and adoptions with industrial data or similar technical fields within a dynamic and emerging strategy.
  • Track record building secure, high-performing cloud platforms.
  • Experience in working with data lakes, compute, networking, and micro-window architectures.
  • History of integrating design principles into complex software solutions.
  • Exposure to edge computing or AI/ML deployment.
  • Experience collaborating with senior product leaders on go-to-market plans.
  • Leadership in embedding customer-driven priorities into engineering strategies and roadmaps.
  • Familiarity with renewable energy data is a plus.
  • Managing globally distributed, diverse teams.
  • Successfully delivered products in fast-paced startup or scale-up environments.
  • Experience driving cross-departmental initiatives that align with strategic goals.

 

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
  • Training or certification in cloud platforms (any of AWS, Azure, or GCP).
  • Documented expertise in agile or DevOps methodologies.
  • Proven success architecting enterprise data solutions.
  • Demonstrated commitment to building inclusive and high-performing teams.
  • Evidence of continuous learning (conferences, certifications, courses).
  • Leadership coursework or substantial industry experience.
  • Dedication to responsible, profitable growth aligned with our mission.
  • Strong track record of results-oriented decision-making.
  • Willingness to act as a champion for diversity in recruiting and team development.

 

At RES we celebrate difference as we know it makes our company a great place to work. Encouraging applicants with different backgrounds, ideas and points of view, we create teams who work together to solve complex problems and design practical solutions for our clients. Our multiple perspectives come from many sources including the diverse ethnicity, culture, gender, nationality, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, marital status, parental status, education, social background and life experience of our people.

#LI-GF1