Requisition ID 36057 Office Country United Kingdom Office City London Division Information Technology Contract Type Fixed Term Contract Length 3 years Posting End Date
Purpose of Job
The Principal is responsible for defining the strategy and leading the implementation of their specialism across delivery teams, the department and customers. The roles core focus is to enable engineering teams to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible in line with and in order to deliver maximum value to our business.
The Principal is responsible for leading delivery teams, working cross functionally across the department and with the business to implement and develop standards, foster a unified approach, and leverage agile values, principles, and practices.
The role facilitates an environment conducive to the success of engineering teams and is accountable for the strategy and delivery of their specific departmental and business strategies.
The role constantly innovates and leads the creation of a product and delivery mindset, ensuring high levels of engagement, effective adoption of business change with internal teams, business stakeholders and external partners.
Accountabilities & Responsibilities
Simplify to amplify
Working within a capability and/or across the department, and in collaboration with Product Owners, the Principal takes a strategic approach to simplifying processes and removing unnecessary complexity. They focus on enabling teams to prioritise and complete the highest-value work, recognising that speed and impact are achieved by eliminating bottlenecks and waste. The Principal is dedicated to streamlining workflows, ensuring that teams work with autonomy and efficiency while fostering a culture of continuous reflection and adaptation. By considering the broader impact across teams, business units, and processes, the Principal ensures that simplification leads to amplifying results and better business outcomes.
Act decisively, commit fully
The Principal role models, champions, and enables teams to make informed decisions by providing clear understanding of the \"why, what, and how,\" ensuring full alignment and commitment from all involved. The Principal excels at decision-making discipline, helping the team cut through noise and avoid over-engineering solutions, focusing on the most impactful work. They resolve ambiguity swiftly, providing clear direction and confidence in uncertain situations. When decisions are outside their remit, the Principal proactively seeks clarity on who is responsible for unblocking them, ensuring there are no barriers to efficient, high-speed delivery. This approach directly impacts colleague experience and enhances EBRD’s agility, enabling the organisation to deliver value faster and with greater impact..
Listen well and speak up
The Principal role models and champions behaviours that foster psychological safety and healthy communication within their teams. They believe that when people feel heard and encouraged to share diverse perspectives, the team delivers better outcomes. The Principal listens deeply and with curiosity, always seeking to understand before making decisions. They create an environment where everyone feels comfortable expressing concerns, challenging ideas, and offering feedback. The Principal speaks with clarity and confidence, ensuring insights, risks, and decisions are communicated in ways that drive action. They advocate for the right things—such as user needs and team priorities—and are proactive in closing the feedback loop, ensuring that feedback is acknowledged, acted upon, and communicated back to the team.
Collaborate smartly
The Principal thinks \"Bank Wide\" and champions collaboration across IT functions, EBRD business teams, and external partners. They facilitate open dialogue and actively work to break down silos, ensuring that team members across different functions are aligned and focused on continuous improvement. The Principal embraces an empower over control mindset, trusting teams to own their work while providing strategic guidance to ensure alignment with broader business objectives. They focus on optimising ways of working, minimising interdependencies and disruptions, and ensuring the team delivers continuous value. The Principal makes trade-offs transparent, ensuring stakeholders understand the impact of prioritisation decisions, which fosters trust and alignment across teams.
Engineering Excellence
The Principal leads in embedding delivery principles and ways of working across teams, creating an environment where engineers can thrive. They recognise the ultimate value of technical delivery and actively foster a culture of engineering excellence aligned with IT standards and best practices. The Principal is a champion for craftsmanship, advocating for clean code, automation, and strong DevOps practices to support high-performing teams. They lead by example, sharing knowledge and helping all team members develop technical expertise. Through continuous learning and improvement practices, the Principal ensures that work is delivered to the highest standards, while prioritising value and adaptability. They also use data and key performance indicators to measure progress, track performance, and drive accountability across teams
Agile Ways of Working
The Principal will be a leading member of the agile community of practice, and will act as champion for ways of working. The role leads the continuous improvement of the playbook and fosters a culture for teams to actively seek feedback using data on velocity, cycle times and other key metrics, to encourage improvements in the flow of value and agility of the department. The role works to further embed agile ways of working across the Business, as part of our goal to embed organisational agility.
Managing cost and budget
The Principal, though not directly managing a cost centre, is responsible for delivering work in a cost-effective manner. They enable teams to focus on optimising efficiency and delivering value, ensuring resources are used effectively to maximise ROI. The Principal fosters a culture of continuous improvement in cost management, ensuring that work is delivered within organisational budget constraints while driving innovation, reducing waste, and aligning with financial governance practices.
Quality at our core
The Principal takes full accountability for ensuring that team members deliver work to the expected levels of quality and within deadlines. They work closely with the Quality Community of Practice to ensure the bank's quality assurance standards are understood and embedded into the team's ways of working. The Principal promotes peer reviews, collaboration, and the use of quality metrics, ensuring transparency and enabling teams to take ownership of continuous improvement in quality.
Secure First
The Principal plays a crucial role in enabling teams to adopt a shift-left approach to security, coordinating the planning and alignment of work to ensure that security is embedded throughout the delivery process. They actively promote and facilitate integrated, cross-functional collaboration between engineering and Cyber and IT security teams, helping to upskill team members and fully integrate a DevSecOps and Security-First culture. The Principal is a champion for ensuring security is prioritised from the outset, influencing the design and architecture of solutions to ensure they are secure by design. They lead by balancing speed and innovation with proactive risk management, ensuring that security is embedded in all decisions and workflows to safeguard the organisation’s assets.
Drives User Experience
The Principal works closely with teams to foster a user-centric and outcome-focused culture, ensuring that every piece of work is aligned with business goals and prioritises the user experience. They play a key role in supporting teams to adopt agile ways of working and a continuous improvement mindset. By doing so, the Principal ensures that services are optimised not just for functionality, but for user experience, ensuring ease of use and meeting end-user expectations. The Principal promotes a close partnership between engineering and business teams, ensuring that work is not only user-friendly but also aligned with business requirements and overall strategic goals, driving the continuous delivery of value.
Specialisms:
Lead and take ownership of complex, cross-functional IT delivery programs across multiple squads, ensuring alignment with organisational technology strategies and objectives.
Manage Agile delivery processes, balancing flexibility with necessary controls to ensure on-time, within-scope delivery of IT solutions that meet business value and technical outcomes. Empower teams to collaborate, adapt, and drive delivery efficiency while maintaining a focus on delivering high-impact technology solutions.
Build and manage relationships with senior IT and business stakeholders, instilling a Product mindset, and ensuring clear communication on delivery goals, progress, risks, and outcomes. Effectively manage expectations and ensure alignment on scope, timelines, and key milestones, with a primary focus on Agile delivery and secondary considerations for Waterfall structures when required.
Lead by example, mentoring and coaching team members on Agile delivery best practices, continuous improvement, and Agile maturity. Foster a culture of collaboration, self-organisation, and agility, while maintaining flexibility to apply Waterfall techniques where necessary for certain IT projects with more rigid requirements.
Identify and implement improvements to Agile delivery practices across multiple squads, enabling the scaling of Agile methods to achieve efficiency and effectiveness at the departmental level. Ensure that practices such as Scrum, Kanban, and continuous delivery are adapted and optimised to fit the complexity of large-scale IT delivery efforts, driving cross-team collaboration, consistency, and high-quality output.
Ensure all aspects of delivery governance are met, focusing primarily on Agile frameworks. This includes managing stage gates, budgets, financial controls, steering group presentations, service design, and service transition as needed in hybrid or large-scale IT projects. Proactively identify, assess, and manage delivery risks and dependencies across multiple IT teams
Facilitate the preparation of business cases for IT projects, focusing on clearly articulating scope, benefits, costs, and risk mitigation strategies. Develop timelines, delivery models, and resource allocation plans that prioritise Agile methods.
Knowledge, Skills, Experience & Qualifications
Education and Qualifications
Expert understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, etc.), with significant experience in leading complex, cross-functional technology delivery programs and projects, ensuring alignment with business strategies and objectives.
In-depth knowledge of Waterfall and hybrid adaptive delivery and governance frameworks, enabling the integration of these practices within Agile delivery to meet organisational needs and balance flexibility with necessary controls.
Excellent leadership and communication skills, enabling strong engagement with senior stakeholders across business and technical teams. Skilled in translating complex project information to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Experience in risk and dependency management, proactively identifying and mitigating delivery risks across multiple teams
Expertise in stakeholder management and expectation setting, ensuring clear communication on project scope, timelines, and progress, balancing Agile flexibility with the organisational need for control and visibility.
Extensive experience in Agile delivery, with a strong track record of leading complex, cross-functional programs and projects. Proven success in managing multiple teams, driving delivery outcomes, and collaborating with senior stakeholders.
Proven experience in managing and scaling Agile practices across an organisation, with a deep understanding of how to apply Agile frameworks to ensure efficiency and effectiveness, especially in large, enterprise-level technology transformations.
Experience in managing and resolving risks, dependencies, and issues at an enterprise level, using both Agile and Waterfall methodologies to ensure project success.
Experience in large-scale, cross-functional delivery and the ability to navigate complexity in enterprise environments, managing multiple teams and integrating Agile methods across diverse functions.
What is it like to work at the EBRD?
Our agile and innovative approach is what makes life at the EBRD a unique experience! You will be part of a pioneering and diverse international organisation, and use your talents to make a real difference to people's lives and help shape the future of the regions we invest in.
The EBRD environment provides you with:
Varied, stimulating and engaging work that gives you an opportunity to interact with a wide range of experts in the financial, political, public and private sectors across the regions we invest in; A working culture that embraces inclusion and celebrates diversity; An environment that places sustainability, equality and digital transformation at the heart of what we do.
Diversity is one of the Bank’s core values which are at the heart of everything it does. A diverse workforce with the right knowledge and skills enables connection with our clients, brings pioneering ideas, energy and innovation. The EBRD staff is characterised by its rich diversity of nationalities, cultures and opinions and we aim to sustain and build on this strength. As such, the EBRD seeks to ensure that everyone is treated with respect and given equal opportunities and works in an inclusive environment. The EBRD encourages all qualified candidates who are nationals of the EBRD member countries to apply regardless of their racial, ethnic, religious and cultural background, gender, sexual orientation or disabilities. As an inclusive employer, we promote flexible working and expecting our employee to attend the office 50% of their working time.
Please note, that due to the high volume of applications received, we regret to inform you that we are unable to provide detailed feedback to candidates who have not been shortlisted (for further consideration).