SVP – Engineering — Subscription-Mobility Portfolio

The mandate

The subscription business is leaving several UK cities and concentrating fleet and customer investment in markets with sufficient density. Its engineering estate still contains local eligibility rules, vehicle feeds, pricing variants and support workflows for the wider footprint. Simply switching them off would strand customer records, recurring payments, refunds and statutory data. Keeping them indefinitely would preserve cost and distract teams from reliability in the retained portfolio. The SVP must engineer a controlled contraction and a stronger core.

Approximately 650 engineers and material partners work across customer applications, subscription services, vehicle integrations, data, quality, reliability and developer platforms. Product determines customer priorities; finance and operations own commercial and vehicle transition. Engineering is accountable for the technical sequence, data integrity, service continuity and retirement evidence. The role also includes organisation choices as teams built around former city growth are redirected.

The portfolio has accumulated acceptable individual services but weak end-to-end ownership. Billing incidents are investigated separately from contract changes and vehicle status. The successor should use city exits to clarify domains and reliability rather than initiate an indiscriminate rewrite. Technical debt needs an economic and operational consequence, not merely an age label.

Closure also creates long-tail obligations. Customers may return vehicles after local teams leave; payment disputes and legal access requests can arrive years later; finance needs reproducible balances during audit. The engineering plan must retain the smallest safe capability to serve those cases, document who can restore archived data and rehearse restoration. A dormant system is not retired if nobody can prove or retrieve the records it holds.

Why this seat is open

The incumbent will relocate abroad after an agreed term and remains available for planned handover. The strategic change gives the replacement a distinct mission and makes an external search appropriate. Selection before the first city exit will let the new leader own the retirement standard and engineering organisation design.

What you will own

• Create technical exit plans covering customer access, contracts, balances, payments, vehicle data, support, retention and statutory deletion.
• Define target engineering domains and accountable owners for subscription, billing, vehicle and customer journeys.
• Set retirement evidence, including zero active dependency, archived records, financial reconciliation, monitoring and rollback.
• Improve reliability objectives for signup, renewal, billing, vehicle access and roadside-support hand-offs.
• Reduce city-specific code and configuration while retaining variation required by law or valid commercial proposition.
• Reallocate engineers through transparent skill assessment, learning and role selection rather than preserving legacy team boundaries.
• Govern cloud, supplier and licence exits so savings are realised after technical retirement.
• Strengthen incident command, secure release and data-control practices during elevated change.

The first 12 months

In 90 days, map city dependencies and active customer obligations, review the last fifteen cross-domain incidents and identify services without credible owners. Agree retirement and data-retention standards with legal, finance and operations. Publish the target organisation and provide employees with assessment and transition timing before making final role decisions.

By month six, complete the first city technical exit, reconcile all affected balances and retire selected integrations with tested recovery. Establish critical-journey observability and common engineering operating practices. Move capacity into retained-market reliability and resolve the highest-frequency billing and vehicle-status defect classes.

At twelve months, complete planned city exits without material customer loss or statutory data failure, remove 20% of addressable engineering run cost and reduce severity-one incidents by 40%. Critical journeys should meet 99.95% availability, 99.8% of contract and billing records should reconcile, and regretted attrition among designated technical talent should remain below 10% through organisation change.

What the board will measure

• Customer, financial and legal integrity through city technology exits.
• Engineering cost removed after actual service and vendor retirement.
• Reliability improvement in the retained subscription portfolio.
• Clear domain ownership and reduction of recurring cross-system incidents.
• Fair redeployment and preservation of critical engineering capability.
• Honest readiness decisions and early escalation of exit risk.

The person

You have 22–28 years in software engineering leadership for subscription, mobility, fintech, telecom or another recurring-payment service connected to physical delivery. You have retired markets, products or platforms with active customer contracts and have led engineers through the accompanying organisation change.

Your relevant scale includes at least 450 engineers and a platform exceeding £250 million in annual transactions, revenue or contracts. You can explain the record-level exit checks, how savings reached the P&L and why one old service deserved to remain. References should establish reliability ownership, transparent people decisions and willingness to delay cutover when evidence failed.

This onsite London role reports to the Group Chief Executive or designated sponsor and includes travel to operating locations and technology partners.

Compensation and terms

The base range is £210,000–280,000 plus annual incentive tied to exit integrity, reliability, realised cost, data control and leadership. This permanent onsite London appointment reports to the Group Chief Executive or designated executive sponsor. The planned succession permits a notice period up to six months and structured handover.

Confidentiality

The portfolio, cities, customer obligations and architecture are confidential. Further information is limited to candidates who establish fit, clear conflicts and sign a mutual undertaking. Facts are rounded and recombined to prevent identification; applicants must not question vendors, employees or customers about possible city withdrawals.