VP Engineering

Rowden

VP Engineering leading the engineering discipline at Rowden, a technology company specializing in systems for defense and national security. Ensuring high standards and quality during rapid growth phase.

Posted 5/22/2026full-timeBristol • 🇬🇧 United KingdomLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed Systems

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the overall engineering discipline across Rowden, including standards, practices, technical quality and engineering culture.
Establish and reinforce consistent engineering expectations across engineering teams, including code quality, review practices, testing, design documentation, security and technical debt management.
Ensure engineering quality remains high as the business scales rapidly across multiple business lines.
Balance standardisation with pragmatism, recognising where consistency improves execution and where flexibility is required for innovation and specialist technical work.
Lead the Chief Engineers and engineering leadership community, strengthening technical leadership capability throughout the organisation.
Own the engineering talent pipeline end-to-end, including hiring strategy, progression, succession planning and performance management. Partnering closely with the Talent & People teams to scale the organisation.
Maintain a high performance and high trust engineering culture.
Make difficult people and organisational decisions early and decisively where standards, behaviours or performance fall below the required bar.
Provide technical leadership and judgement across a broad range of engineering disciplines.
Contribute to engineering delivery through regular engagement with technical discussions, design reviews, integration activity, manufacturing sessions and customer trials.
Add value through technical judgement, challenge and calibration across disciplines rather than through narrow domain ownership.
Support strong technical decision-making across business lines and engineering teams.
Recognise technical, delivery and organisational risks early and intervene appropriately.
Plan, prioritise, and implement initiatives to build and improve engineering capabilities while balancing delivery work.
Help maintain a strong balance between engineering excellence, pace and operational delivery.
Lead through line management and influence, within a hybrid reporting model spanning multiple business lines and technical domains.
Work closely with the CEO, COO, Business Line Leads, Chief Architect, VP Platforms and VP Product to strengthen engineering execution across the company.
Partner closely with the Engineering Operations Manager to improve engineering visibility, operational insight, organisational effectiveness and scaling decisions across the business.
Build trust and credibility with technical leaders, programme teams and business leadership.
Support the scaling of engineering operations, tooling, processes and organisational structure as the company grows beyond 250 people.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Experience leading complex engineering organisations through growth, increasing scale and organisational complexity.
Experience scaling multidisciplinary engineering teams in a measured and resource-conscious way while maintaining delivery pace and technical standards.
Strong engineering judgement and the ability to assess technical quality, risk and trade-offs across disciplines beyond your own specialism.
Broad technical fluency across areas such as software, distributed systems, embedded systems, RF, FPGA, hardware or ML-driven systems.
Credibility with experienced engineers and technical leaders through sound judgement, pragmatism and the ability to improve technical and delivery outcomes.
Experience building operational visibility across engineering delivery, technical risk, capability gaps, resourcing and engineering health.
A hands-on leadership style that stays close to engineering work, technical discussions and delivery realities without becoming a bottleneck.
The confidence to make difficult people and organisational decisions when standards, behaviours or performance fall below the bar.
Experience operating in mission-critical, safety-critical, regulated or operationally demanding environments.
Experience in defence, national security, aerospace, communications, regulated technology or adjacent sectors would be valuable, but not required.

Benefits

Comp & perks

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!
We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.
Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.
Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!

ATS Keywords

✓ Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

engineering standardscode qualitytechnical qualitydesign documentationtechnical debt managementrisk assessmentsoftware developmentdistributed systemsembedded systemsmachine learning

Soft Skills

technical leadershipdecision-makingpeople managementcommunicationtrust buildingpragmatismorganizational effectivenessperformance managementcollaborationinfluence