Product Engineering Director

Global Operation Centre, Romania

Join the Access Family and see how we make software ideas become a reality!

Our core value of ‘Love work, Love life’ has been central to our success and so we’re looking for people to join us who share our passion for making things better every day, to help us become a UK top 10 Software company driven through adoption of the Access Workspace platform.

Are you ready for the challenge?

 What are we all about? 

At Access we love software and how technology never stays the same. It's this obsession that drives us to work closely across sectors to understand the business needs of our customers - from professional services to manufacturing to not for profits and more.  

We're passionate about helping our customers stay one step ahead of the challenges facing their industry and business. That's why over 1 million users and over 40,000 organisations rely on Access software to help their organisation thrive.  

Role-specific:

We have a very exciting opportunity in our newly created Global Operations (GO) Centre in Timisoara, Romania.  This role will lead the Product Engineering (PE) teams in the GO Centre and have overall responsibility for the site’s performance, motivation, engagement, and delivery of Access’ ambitious goals.

You will help establish and lead rapidly growing Product and Engineering teams, building a strong culture and brand for engineering excellence.

You will be responsible for the creation of a new central, multi-skilled "acceleration team". This multi-disciplined team will help divisions adopt and implement strategic technologies that will deliver greater value, much more quickly for our customers.

You will represent P&E as part of the GO Centre’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and will be passionate about your teams, what can be achieved with technology and who wants to build a world-class site that is part of the global success of Access.

Primary Accountabilities:

• Part of the regional Product & Engineering leadership team, responsible for the management of the software development & delivery for the products assigned, contributing to the achievement of growth and client satisfaction targets. Taking a holistic view to support Corporate as well as Divisional objectives.
• Recruit and setup a multi-disciplined acceleration team consisting of multiple squads that will help divisions adopt strategic technologies quickly and efficiently
• Use in-depth understanding and appreciation of agile software development best practices, customer problems, collaboration through virtualised/distributed squads and the competitive landscape along with research and metrics to inform decisions & approaches.
• Structured and established approach of measuring and developing product delivery flow from squads using our own Access Engineering Agile methods to deliver.
• Adopt Access Engineering methods and drive a compelling local adoption approach to the GOC squads, ensuring a progressive, reliable, and efficient production capability, aligned to the divisional roadmaps and commercial goals.
• Work with divisional heads to understand the company portfolio, contribute to the overall product strategy, integration, quality and cost control.
• Sponsor all product development projects within the GOC
• Create a one team culture across the various divisional P&E teams
• Responsible for the management, development, progression and operational capability of various GOC squads, including training, appraisals, employee engagement, discipline, recruitment, retention & attrition.
• Motivate employees to achieve peak productivity and performance through local engagement initiatives
• Lead, motivate, develop and manage the performance of the GOC squads to ensure that they have the skills and support to achieve their potential and meet the company’s needs.
• Work both with Global GOC and divisional PE management teams to maximise the development and performance of the GOC squads and grow to provide broader support to divisional Product Engineering needs.

About you:

• You demonstrate excellent leadership, motivation and team development skills, able to cross boundaries and collaboratively drive excellence through positive change. Your cohesive leadership ensures development teams are aligned across the department
• You are comfortable to lead in a matrix environment and can work efficiently with ambiguity in role and control
• You are obsessive about performance and delivery, fostering a high-performance culture and creating an environment where talent thrives
• You are an excellent communicator able to communicate at all levels and adopt a flexible & consultative approach.
• You can think strategically whilst achieving results in immediate area of responsibility and drive strategic and change initiatives to success.
• You can think creatively and exploit best practice, emerging technologies and fast-paced innovation.
• You are able to adapt to a changing business and marketplace, demonstrable ability to takes a holistic view to support Corporate as well as departmental strategic objectives and underwrites production excellence through KPIs and best practice across the group. 
• You are pragmatic, objective, resilient, transferrable, balanced, and able to navigate and manage divisional contention to the benefit of the group. 
• You have more than 8 years experience managing software engineering squads and can demonstrate the skills and experience needed to transfer knowledge, recruit engineering talent, grow teams rapidly, closely manage the squads performance, develop team leads that can be responsible to running delivery and technical quality of the squads.

Your core competencies will include:

• Excellent leadership, motivation and team development skills – across multiple teams & locations - able to cross boundaries and collaboratively drive positive change up & down the chain of command.
• Excellent communicator able to communicate at all levels and adopt a flexible & consultative approach.
• Ability to think strategically whilst achieving results in own Divisions with consideration for the wider company strategy and objectives.
• Excellent understanding of software development lifecycle, Agile methods and delivery, and able to deliver complex projects across multiple workstreams to time, budget and quality
• Commercial experience and a sound understanding of agile software development practices in a scaled production environment.
• The ability to adapt to a changing business and marketplace.
• Demonstrable ability to drive operational excellence and efficiency across multiple teams and locations, promoting best practice standards and approaches, effecting change where appropriate to achieve results.
• Collaboration and influence at Senior Management level in order to achieve best results for division and department. 
• Experience in Microsoft Windows and Azure cloud development environments.

What does Access offer you?

We are a growing software company and we deliver on what we say we do! We take the development of our people very seriously! We will work with you to carve out your success plan and an opportunity to accelerate your career and make a real difference.

• Healthy, friendly, and inclusive culture
• Work - life balance
• Hybrid/Remote working
• Flexible working hours
• Competitive salary package
• Great Holiday Package (starting from 25)
• Charity day – day off paid by the company for volunteering activities
• Private Healthcare & Life Insurance
• Sport Allowance
• Meal tickets
• Referral Bonus
• Christmas Bonus
• Big Break – all-inclusive holiday paid by the company
• Other benefits

 At Access we’re all about helping everyone Love Work, Love Life and Be you. Why? Because we believe people can only be their best when they can be themselves. So, if you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t match perfectly, we’d still love to hear from you. You might just be who we are looking for.  

We love the fact that we’re all different. We believe by having more diverse perspectives at work improves how we run our business, helps us to better support our customers, and when you think about it, it’s just more fun! 

What’s holding you back? Come and be part of our Amazing Access Family!  

Love Work. Love Life. Be You.