SVP, Engineering (Hybrid)

Location: UK, commutable distance to Winnersh. Hybrid.

Our Mission

At Trustonic, we make smartphones affordable for the many — enabling global access to devices and digital finance through the world’s most secure smartphone locking technology. We partner with mobile carriers, retailers, and financiers across 30+ countries, powering device financing solutions that drive economic inclusion, profitability, and growth.

Our Culture

We pride ourselves on living by the Trustonic culture code, a blueprint for our journey that recognises that great working environments don’t guarantee success, but bad ones almost always ensure failure.

Working here, you’ll find a company that celebrates its diversity and is looking to do the right thing: for each other, the community and the planet. We believe in equal opportunities and take to heart the old African proverb ’If you only want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together’.

We work flexibly when and where we’re at our best, but regardless of how you choose to work, we’ll make sure you feel like one of the team.

Click here if you would like to find out more about Trustonic's culture code.

If you would like to work in a fast-moving global technology company, with great ambition, then we’d love to hear from you!

A bit about the team and what you’ll deliver

We are seeking a world-class SVP of Engineering to lead and strengthen the build, delivery and technical ownership of Trustonic’s Telecoms Platform. This is a mission-critical role, reporting directly to the CEO and working in close partnership with peers across Product and Operations.

You will be responsible for delivering a highly reliable, scalable, and secure platform (TP3) while embedding the engineering discipline, governance, and metrics required to support Trustonic’s next stage of growth. This role requires both strategic oversight and operational excellence, ensuring that Trustonic’s technology remains scalable, performant, reliable and aligned with product and customer priorities.

The SVP Engineering will bring structure, focus, and resilience to a team of c25 in-house engineers and c30 offshore developers with another 60-70 via offshore development partners. The role will provide oversight for key contributors (including the VP Product Development, Engineering Director-Americas and Director, Programme & Operations), instilling engineering best practices across the organisation.

As the SVP, Engineering you will:

Strategic ownership

• Own and evolve the engineering strategy in alignment with product, commercial, and business objectives.
• Guide long-term technology architecture and infrastructure planning for global scalability.
• Embed platform reliability, service quality, and performance metrics at the heart of engineering execution.

• Oversee a scalable, secure multi-tenant SaaS architecture on AWS; drive standards, patterns, and guardrails, including Android & applications
• Lead an effective blended development model with clear SOWs, SLAs, quality gates, secure access, and code ownership.
• Manage engineering/infrastructure budgets and provide strategic oversight for FinOps practices, unit economics tracking, and the maintenance of a transparent risk register and remediation plans.

Execution and delivery

• Lead disciplined engineering execution across distributed in-house and outsourced teams.
• Champion 24/7/365 platform operations with SLAs, capacity planning, incident response and post-mortems
• Implement structured software release governance, migration frameworks, and robust QA practices.
• Drive predictable delivery (quarterly planning, dependency/risk management, quality gates).
• Establish and enforce best-in-class DevOps, trunk-based, CI/CD, and monitoring standards.
• Sponsor the adoption of secure SDLC, threat modelling, vulnerability management, identity/authorisation, privacy by design; ISO27001/9001, security posture and customer due diligence.

Cross-functional leadership

• Partner closely with Product leaders to ensure product discovery, prioritisation, and delivery processes are respected and aligned.
• Work closely with Operations and Support to ensure handoffs are smooth, access is appropriately managed, and support tooling is fit for purpose.
• Create transparency and accountability through clear reporting of engineering performance to the Executive and wider leadership team.

Team and organisation

• Lead, design, grow, mentor and inspire a global team of in-house/offshore engineers and external development partners.
• Build a strong engineering culture that values quality, resilience, accountability, and collaboration.
• Actively address key-person risks by distributing knowledge and creating scalable structures.
• Lead the recruitment, focus on retention, and development of engineering talent to build a high-performance organisation.

6–12 Month Success outcomes look like...

Within 6 Months:

• Clear engineering strategy and execution framework in place, aligned with product and commercial priorities.
• Robust SLAs, monitoring, and reporting mechanisms embedded into operations.
• Knowledge dependency risks reduced through documentation, handover, and team development.
• Stronger engineering governance visible across release, QA, and support processes.

Within 12 Months:

• All customer platform migration work completed with minimal customer disruption.
• All current strict customer uptime/service level requirements adhered to.
• Engineering organisation operating with clear cadence, discipline, and accountability.
• Measurable improvements in platform resilience, incident response, and support handoffs.
• Engineering seen as a trusted, proactive partner by Product, Commercial, and Operations.

Who you are as a leader

• Builder’s mindset & hands‑on pragmatism: comfortable diving into design reviews, deployment decisions, or an incident bridge.
• Low‑ego, high‑trust collaborator with the CPO/Product leaders; co‑authors a single message to the org; avoids “two captains” anti‑pattern.
• High EQ: able to build trust, support and empower key contributors, and lead teams through transformation.
• Calm under pressure, with a track record of stabilising high-urgency technical environments.
• Expert at retaining, hiring, mentoring, coaching and developing senior engineering talent at ‘Head of/Director level’.

What makes you, you

Experience

• Significant experience in senior engineering leadership roles within B2B SaaS, telecoms, fintech, or infrastructure platforms.
• Demonstrable experience of defining and executing an engineering strategy aligned with Company goals
• Proven track record of leading and scaling globally distributed engineering teams (50 – 200), 24/7/365, including outsourced/ODC partners and development partners.
• Experience blending in-house and partner teams without loss of quality or security.
• Experience leading ISO standard and GDPR compliance programmes.
• Deep expertise in providing strategic oversight and guidance for AWS cloud architecture (including EKS/ECS, serverless, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, ALB/NLB, SNS/SQS/Kinesis, KMS/Secrets), infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK), and observability practices, ensuring best-in-class standards are set and maintained across engineering teams.
• Experience stewarding the implementation of scalable architectures (multi-tenant, API-first, streaming/events, caching) and resiliency patterns (graceful degradation, bulkheads, back pressure), empowering teams to deliver robust solutions.
• Experience leading and governing SRE/DevOps practices at scale, including CI/CD, incident management, post-mortems, and capacity & cost management, fostering a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement.
• Sponsor and champion security leadership, including secure SDLC, identity/authorization (SAML/OIDC, SCIM), data protection, and compliance with ISO 27001 / GDPR, ensuring teams are equipped to meet and exceed regulatory and customer expectations.
• Experience in building strong partnerships with Product, Sales, Customer Success, and external customers: evidence of constructive trade-offs with a CPO/Product leaders; clear communication to execs/Board

Knowledge

• Cloud-native SaaS on AWS, distributed systems, data consistency & resiliency; identity and access patterns.
• Telecoms/device ecosystem and integrations (operators, OEMs), enterprise security and compliance expectations.
• Cost optimisation and unit economics for cloud platforms.

Skills

• Skilled at balancing technical innovation with pragmatic delivery and customer commitments.
• Ability to set and evolve technical standards, patterns, and guardrails for a modern SaaS platform.
• Skilled in org design, career ladders, performance management, and fostering a high-bar engineering culture.
• Ability to drive reliability, performance, and cost efficiency in cloud environments.
• Skilled sponsor and champion of secure SDLC, threat modelling, vulnerability management, and privacy by design.
• Ability to partner with product and legal teams on security trade-offs and customer due diligence.
• Skilled in agile delivery, quarterly planning, dependency/risk management, and quality assurance.
• Ability to drive predictable delivery, manage technical debt, and continuously improve engineering velocity.
• Strong financial acumen: managing engineering/cloud budgets, AWS FinOps, and tracking unit economics.
• Proactive risk identification and mitigation across technology, operations, and security.
• Excellent communication skills: able to engage with senior engineers, executives, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to contribute to roadmap planning and trade-offs, and present to the senior level.
• Able to mentor and coach; sets crisp standards; builds a psychologically safe, high-bar culture.

• Masters’s degree in engineering, computer science, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• AWS certified, desirable
• Leadership and management CPD, qualifications or certifications, desirable.

What we can provide you in return for your investment

Competitive compensation

• A base salary that reflects your expertise and impact.
• Bonus scheme to share in our success.

Financial security & wellbeing

• Immediate participation in our pension scheme.
• Private medical insurance for you and your family from day one.
• Income protection and life insurance for peace of mind.

Flexibility & work-life balance

• Hybrid working arrangements to support your lifestyle.
• An open holiday policy with no upper limit—take the time you need, when you need it.
• Support for volunteering and causes that matter to you.

Growth & development

• Opportunities for professional development and career progression.
• Exposure to global teams and international travel for collaboration and learning.

Inclusive, supportive culture

• A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• A collaborative environment where your voice is valued and your wellbeing is prioritised.

Impact & purpose

• The chance to work on technology that drives global economic inclusion and makes a real difference in people’s lives.
• A leadership role where your decisions shape the future of our company and industry.

Trustonic is an equal opportunity employer.  We do not discriminate on any grounds. We empower, engage, enable and value differences between people, including; different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations, with differences in education, backgrounds, skill sets, experiences and knowledge.

Trustonic is an equal opportunity employer.  We do not discriminate on any grounds. We empower, engage, enable and value differences between people, including; different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations, with differences in education, backgrounds, skill sets, experiences and knowledge.