Chief Technology Officer/R&D Director

People and Culture 

• Transition the development team to a product-based approach to development and delivery, as measured by a reduction in the bespoke effort new tenders require 

• The team relies today on a concentrated team of highly experienced subject matter experts. The incoming CTO/R&D Director will widen and deepen that expertise so that individual SMEs are not bottlenecks in delivery 

• Overseeing management of engineering leads across all product and platform teams 

• Developing the next layer of engineering leadership and identifying capability gaps early 

• Driving consistency in working practices across teams and geographies, in a way that respects the deep experience already in place.

Engineering Delivery 

• Develop sound processes backed by proper use of tools to ensure measurable improvements in delivering to agreed timescales and budgets 

• Accelerate the use of automated approaches to testing, covering both functional and non-functional requirements, so that builds can be rapidly tested across all customers simultaneously, reducing time to release and regression defect rates 

• Ensure that processes and training are in place to support secure-by-design and secure-by-default, as required by the EU Cyber Resilience Act 

• Be rigorous in the approach to build-versus-buy for supporting software components, and in the cost-benefit analysis of open source versus commercial offerings 

• Root cause analysis: systematic investigation of recurring issues across releases, including fault history, installation failures, and release note quality, so that patterns are identified and addressed at source 

• Ensure KPIs are automatically tracked and communicated, driving measurable improvements in on-time rate against programme and contract milestones, defect escape rate, and mean time to recovery 

Engineering Operations 

• Capacity planning across multiple projects in different geographies that anticipates demand and accurately estimates time to complete tasks 

• Deployment standards across both cloud and on-premise delivery models, ensuring best practice is applied consistently regardless of infrastructure 

• Contractor and third-party development relationships: performance oversight, quality alignment, and a plan to manage dependency over time 

AI and Modern Practices 

• ebblo is advancing through a structured maturity model for AI-assisted software development, progressing from limited AI support today toward a future state where AI manages the full development cycle, from specification through deployment, under developer guidance. You will lead ebblo's journey toward this level of maturity. 

• AI adoption is a strategic priority for the organisation. Working closely with the Product Management team and senior leadership, you will ensure AI adoption translates into measurable gains in speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness, with this being an immediate area of focus. The successful candidate will have proven experience driving an AI-first development lifecycle.