VP Engineering
Department: Engineering
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Bristol, UK
Reporting To: Rob Harper
Description
We're building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.
Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 160 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe's fastest-growing engineering businesses.
The Role: We are already working with an exclusive search partner for this role and are not seeking additional recruitment agency support at this stage. We will not accept unsolicited agency approaches.
Rowden is looking for a VP Engineering to lead and strengthen the engineering discipline across the company as we scale into the next phase of growth.
This is a critical leadership role at an inflection point for the business. Rowden has grown rapidly into one of the fastest growing engineering companies in Europe, delivering mission-critical systems across defence and national resilience. We have a mature offering across complex technology programme delivery, specialist engineering services, and products and sub-systems.
The VP Engineering exists to ensure that scale does not dilute engineering quality, standards, culture or pace.
This role owns the engineering function as a discipline: the people, capabilities, standards, practices and technical calibration that underpin everything Rowden builds. You will not directly own engineering delivery; that responsibility sits within the business lines. Instead, you are responsible for ensuring the engineering organisation has the right people, operating at the right standard, with the right technical and leadership behaviours across the company.
You will lead an engineering team that works across FPGA, RF, embedded systems, distributed software, ML and applications engineering. The breadth is substantial, so we don’t expect you to be the deepest expert in every domain – it is about exercising strong technical judgement, recognising quality, building trust with technical leaders, and creating an engineering function that consistently performs at a high bar.
This role will suit someone who is technically credible, operationally grounded, comfortable making hard decisions, and motivated by building a high-performance engineering organisation in a demanding, mission-led environment. For senior roles, compensation is tailored to the scope of the role and the specific experience a candidate brings. Because that can vary significantly, we do not always publish a fixed salary band. We will, however, discuss compensation openly at the first stage of the process and can share an indicative range before either side invests significant time.
Candidates must be eligible for SC clearance.
More information about security clearance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels
Key areas of responsibility
Engineering leadership and standards:
- 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.
Engineering capability and organisational growth:
- 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.
Technical judgement and engineering execution:
- 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.
Cross-functional leadership:
- 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.
What success looks like
Within the first 6-12 months, you will have:
- Earned the trust of engineers and technical leaders across the business through sound judgement, transparency and practical support.
- Established regular visibility of key engineering risks, capability gaps, resourcing constraints and technical debt across the organisation.
- Reinforced a clear and consistent engineering quality bar across delivery, technical standards, ownership and accountability.
- Improved consistency across engineering practices including code quality, testing, documentation, security and technical review processes.
- Helped scale the engineering organisation without losing technical depth, delivery effectiveness or Rowden’s pragmatic engineering culture.
- Strengthened engineering progression, calibration and performance management across multiple disciplines and teams.
- Improved Rowden’s ability to attract, develop and retain high-calibre engineers while maintaining a high hiring bar.
- Enabled engineering teams to deliver increasingly complex programmes with greater clarity, coordination and fewer organisational bottlenecks.
Key skills, experience and behaviours
We are looking for someone with:
- 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.
What matters in this role:
- You should care deeply about the engineering craft, not just the mechanics of managing teams.
- You should be curious and engaged in the work, taking an active interest in how systems are designed, built and delivered without needing to own every technical detail.
- You should balance ambition with pragmatism, understanding how to continuously improve engineering standards while operating within real delivery, commercial and operational constraints.
- You should combine humility with strong judgement, recognising the expertise of the engineers around you while using your own experience to challenge, guide and improve outcomes.
- You should value visibility, collaboration and in-person engagement, and be committed to working from Rowden’s Bristol HQ at least three days per week.
Working at Rowden
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!
