Head of Product Engineering

Legal & General (L&G) is a leading UK financial services group and major global investor.

We’ve been safeguarding people’s financial futures since 1836, and strive to build a better society, while improving the lives of our customers and creating value for shareholders.

We are one of the world’s largest asset managers and provide powerful asset origination capabilities. Together, these underpin our retirement and protection solutions: we are an international player in pension risk transfer, in UK and US life insurance, and in UK workplace pensions and retirement income.

L&G Institutional Retirement looks after around 700,000 institutional customers who have their retirement benefits secured with us. Operating continuously in the UK market from our entrance in 1987, we are the UK’s longest-running insurer.

Our Institutional Retirement division provides pension risk transfer (PRT) solutions for UK and US defined benefit (DB) schemes, and reinsurance solutions from our global hub in Bermuda. We work with companies, DB pension schemes and their advisors to help them secure and protect scheme members’ retirement benefits.

Joining us means you’ll support customers’ financial security in retirement; help companies to settle their pension liabilities and focus on growing their businesses; and enable investment for the long term to back our pension promises.

We are seeking a strategic and experienced Head of Product Engineering to lead software engineering, architecture, testing, and technology roadmap execution across Institutional Retirement’s internally developed products.

This role is accountable for driving a product-led engineering culture and delivering scalable, secure, and compliant technology solutions aligned with business and regulatory requirements. The ideal candidate will bring deep technical expertise and proven leadership, fostering innovation, excellence, and continuous improvement across cross-functional teams.

What you'll be doing:

• Defining the product engineering strategy to ensure alignment with business objectives and enterprise technology direction
• Overseeing end-to-end software delivery, ensuring projects are executed on time, within budget, and to established quality standards
• Leading and developing high-performing, cross-functional teams while fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement
• Ensuring compliance with security, regulatory, and governance requirements, while effectively managing and mitigating technical debt
• Collaborating with senior stakeholders to align technology initiatives with strategic business goals and communicating technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences
• Driving innovation in engineering practices, tools, and methodologies, and benchmarking performance against industry standards to maintain competitiveness
• Upholding Consumer Duty principles by ensuring digital products and journeys are designed to support informed decision-making and present key information transparently
• Managing employee-related matters in accordance with Group policies and the Partnership Agreement, applying consistent and fair leadership to optimise business performance

Who we're looking for:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline (or equivalent experience)
• Deep understanding of software engineering, solution architecture, testing, and technology roadmapping in complex, regulated environments
• Proven ability to build and lead cross-functional product engineering teams that deliver at scale and drive cultural transformation
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with experience influencing at C-suite level
• In-depth knowledge of Agile, DevSecOps, and modern software development lifecycle methodologies
• Familiarity with cloud-native engineering, event-driven architectures, and API-led integration strategies
• Hands-on experience as a software developer and/or architect in enterprise-scale environments
• Demonstrated technology leadership within regulated financial services, ideally including pensions, life insurance, or asset management

Whatever your role, we reward performance and behaviour with a package that looks after all the things that are important to you. Here are some of the benefits we offer:

• The opportunity to participate in our annual, performance -related bonus plan and valuable share schemes
• Generous pension contribution
• Life assurance
• Healthcare Plan (permanent employees only)
• At least 25 days holiday, plus public holidays, 26 days after 2 years’ service. There’s also the option to buy and sell holiday
• Competitive family leave
• Participate in our electric car scheme, which offers employees the option to hire a brand-new electric car through tax efficient salary sacrifice (permanent employees only)
• There are the many discounts we offer – both for our own products and at a range of high street stores and online
• In 2023, some of our workspaces were redesigned. Our offices are great spaces to connect and collaborate and have your wellbeing at the heart

At L&G, we believe it's possible to generate positive returns today while helping to build a better future for all. 

If you join us, you’ll be part of a welcoming, inclusive culture, with opportunities to collaborate with people of diverse backgrounds, views, and experiences. Guided by leaders with integrity who care about your future and wellbeing. Empowered through initiatives which support people to develop their careers and excel.

We care passionately about outcomes rather than attendance and are therefore open to discussing all kinds of flexible working options including part-time, term-time and job shares. Although some roles have limited flexibility due to customer demand, we accommodate requests when we can. 

It doesn’t matter if you don’t meet every single criterion in this advert. Instead, think about what you excel at and what else you can bring in terms of strengths, potential and connection to our purpose.