Digital Engineering Director

At Merlin Entertainments, we create world-class experiences that bring people together – from LEGOLAND® and SEA LIFE to Madame Tussauds and beyond. As part of our ambitious global digital transformation, we’re looking for a Digital Engineering Director to lead the technology that powers our guest experience across the world.

This is a senior, high-impact leadership role at the heart of our Digital Transformation – shaping the platforms that millions of guests interact with every year.

Reporting to the VP, Global Engineering, you’ll own the end-to-end digital engineering portfolio that underpins Merlin’s global guest journey. From mobile apps and interactive kiosks to ticketing, POS, payments, integration, and cloud platforms – this role sets the technical direction and drives delivery at scale.

You’ll lead multiple high-performing engineering teams and technical leaders, working closely with Product, UX/UI, Operations and Commercial teams to deliver seamless, secure and scalable digital experiences across web, app and on-site touchpoints.

This is a role for a strategic technical leader who can operate confidently at board-level and dive deep when needed.

• Define and execute Merlin’s digital engineering strategy, aligned to our business and technology vision

• Own the multi-year roadmap for all digital platforms, ensuring scalability, security and innovation

• Partner with senior stakeholders to align engineering delivery with commercial and guest outcomes

• Provide technical leadership across mobile, web, kiosk, POS, ticketing, integration and cloud platforms

• Champion modern engineering practices including microservices, API-first and event-driven architectures

• Lead platform engineering, DevOps, SRE and APIM strategies to ensure reliability and performance

• Own the full software development lifecycle, from ideation through to live operations

• Champion agile and DevOps ways of working across global engineering teams

• Manage budgets, vendors and resource planning across the digital portfolio

• Lead, mentor and develop multiple engineering teams, tech leads and managers

• Build a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, learning and accountability

• Drive talent development, succession planning and career progression

• Ensure high availability, resilience and performance across all digital platforms

• Oversee incident management, continuous improvement and operational KPIs

• Ensure compliance with security, data protection and industry standards (e.g. GDPR, PCI-DSS)

• 10+ years’ experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in senior technical leadership roles

• Proven experience leading large-scale digital platforms across mobile, e-commerce, ticketing, POS or payments

• Strong background in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP), microservices and API management

• Deep expertise in agile delivery, DevOps, CI/CD and SRE practices

• Experience leading global, multi-disciplinary engineering teams

• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences

• Commercially minded, with a clear understanding of how technology drives customer experience and revenue

Experience in retail, hospitality or multi-site international environments is a strong advantage.

At Merlin, how you lead matters as much as what you deliver. We’re looking for leaders who are: