Head of Software Development Commercial Excellence

Welcome to Haleon. We’re a purpose-driven, world-class consumer company putting everyday health in the hands of millions. In just three years since our launch, we’ve grown, evolved and are now entering an exciting new chapter – one filled with bold ambitions and enormous opportunity.

Our trusted portfolio of brands – including Sensodyne®, Panadol®, Advil®, Voltaren®, Theraflu®, Otrivin®, and Centrum® – lead in resilient and growing categories. What sets us apart is our unique blend of deep human understanding and trusted science.

Now it’s time to fully realise the full potential of our business and our people. We do this through our Win as One strategy. It puts our purpose – to deliver better everyday health with humanity – at the heart of everything we do. It unites us, inspires us, and challenges us to be better every day, driven by our agile, performance-focused culture.

Role Overview

The Head of Software Development Commercial Excellence provides senior technical leadership across the assigned area and leads a team of Senior Development Leads, each accountable for the technical leadership and development capability of their respective teams.

This is a leader-of-leaders role requiring substantial and current technical credibility. The role holder must be capable of challenging Senior Development Leads, architects and senior technical specialists on software design, code quality, security, cloud platforms, integration and development practices, and moving from strategic direction into detailed technical investigation when the significance or complexity of an issue requires it.

The role does not own programme or product delivery. It works in close partnership with Product, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Service Management and delivery leadership to ensure development teams have the technical capability, standards and leadership required to deliver safely and effectively.

Although not a routine individual contributor, the role holder must retain sufficient practical expertise to inspect code, review technical implementations, interrogate development and cloud environments, create proofs of concept and work directly alongside teams when resolving particularly complex or critical technical challenges.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical strategy and direction

• Define and maintain the software development strategy, technical standards and development practices for the area, within enterprise technology and architecture guardrails.

• Translate enterprise technology strategy and approved architecture into clear technical direction for Senior Development Leads and their teams.

• Evaluate technical proposals and ensure decisions are evidence-based, proportionate and consistent with security, architecture, operability, cost and lifecycle requirements.

• Identify opportunities to simplify the technology estate, increase reuse, improve development effectiveness and reduce unnecessary customization.

2. Leadership of Senior Development Leads and Developers

• Lead, coach and hold Senior Development Leads accountable for the technical direction, capability, quality and health of software development within their respective areas.

• Set clear expectations for technical direction, development standards, technical coaching, succession and management of technical debt, vulnerabilities and lifecycle risks.

• Assess the effectiveness of Senior Development Leads through observable technical and organisational outcomes.

• Build a strong, cohesive technical leadership community that makes consistent decisions, shares effective practices and resolves systemic problems across team boundaries.

• Ensure Senior Development Leads remain sufficiently technically current to lead their teams effectively and address material capability or performance gaps.

3. Technical assurance and software quality

• Establish and assure effective development practices covering software design, code quality, peer review, automated testing, security, continuous integration and deployment, observability and production support.

• Maintain oversight of software quality, reliability, performance, resilience and maintainability, using technical evidence to identify systemic weaknesses and drive improvement.

• Ensure appropriate technical assurance is completed for material changes, complex solutions and areas of elevated risk.

• Personally undertake or lead detailed technical reviews where the complexity, materiality or risk justifies senior intervention.

4. Complex technical problem-solving

• Act as the senior technical escalation point when an issue exceeds the capability, authority or scope of an individual Senior Development Lead.

• Challenge the diagnosis and proposed resolution of complex software, platform, integration, security and production problems, ensuring decisions are based on technical evidence.

• Where necessary, work directly with Senior Development Leads and their teams to inspect code, analyse system behaviour, test technical hypotheses or create proofs of concept.

• Identify when repeated local issues indicate a wider weakness in technical leadership, development standards, platform design or organisational capability.

5. Technical risk, security and lifecycle management

• Own the development view of technical risk across the area, including technical debt, vulnerabilities, unsupported technologies, resilience weaknesses, maintainability concerns and concentrations of knowledge.

• Ensure vulnerabilities and control gaps are understood, prioritised and remediated within agreed tolerances, or appropriately evidenced, escalated and progressed through exception and acceptance processes.

• Maintain clear technology lifecycle plans and hold Senior Development Leads accountable for reducing avoidable technical debt and addressing obsolete or unsupported technology.

• Communicate material technical risks clearly to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.

6. Architecture, platforms, cost and partners

• Work closely with Architecture to ensure proposed solutions align with approved architectural direction and receive the required review and approval before implementation.

• Provide technical oversight of cloud consumption, development tooling and platform usage, challenging inefficient consumption and contributing to forecasts and optimisation plans.

• Provide informed technical challenge when deciding whether business capability should be bought, configured, extended or custom-built, particularly within the Salesforce ecosystem.

• Ensure strategic partners and software vendors comply with required technical, security and quality standards.

• Maintain current knowledge of software development, cloud, platform and security practices and apply that knowledge pragmatically.

Your profile

Required

• Extensive experience designing, developing and operating business-critical software, with recent experience working with modern software development technologies and practices.

• Proven experience leading and developing senior technical leaders, not solely managing individual developers.

• Ability to set technical direction and assure its adoption across multiple teams or technology domains.

• Demonstrable ability to review and challenge code, designs, development practices and technical decisions, using technical evidence to resolve complex and high-impact problems.

• Experience holding technical leaders accountable for software quality, security, capability and lifecycle management.

• Track record of resolving systemic technical problems spanning multiple teams, platforms or suppliers, including making sound technical decisions where priorities compete and information may be incomplete.

• In-depth knowledge of software architecture, APIs, integration patterns, distributed systems and cloud-based development.

• Practical experience with automated testing, continuous integration and deployment, source control, infrastructure as code, observabilit