INTERPOL is hiring a Head of Department to lead the Engineering and Solution Design Competency Center within our ICT Executive Directorate. Reporting directly to the Chief Technology Officer, you will provide strategic leadership for architecture and engineering functions, managing resource allocation, staff development, and driving a culture of engineering excellence.
What You'll Do
- Provide strategic leadership to the Engineering and Solution Design teams, ensuring alignment with ICT governance, enterprise priorities, and operational needs.
- Manage workforce planning, recruitment, performance, and professional development for Engineering and Solution Architecture staff.
- Build and sustain a multidisciplinary team of architects, defining role profiles, competency frameworks, and career development paths.
- Foster a culture of excellence, innovation, accountability, psychological safety, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- Promote effective change management, documentation, knowledge transfer, and structured training to ensure adoption of engineered solutions across ICT.
- Lead the design, delivery, and lifecycle management of cloud-ready and hybrid-cloud infrastructure components (compute, storage, networking, systems).
- Oversee DevOps platform evolution (CI/CD, IaC, container orchestration, observability, automation toolchains), ensuring secure-by-design and compliance-by-default implementation.
- Develop the security and IAM architecture, in collaboration with the CTO and Chief Information Security Officer.
- Provide senior technical leadership across programmes, coordinating engineering dependencies, platform services, and cross-domain delivery activities.
- Ensure robust deployment, integration, incident prevention, root-cause analysis, and post-mortem processes.
- Provide Level 3 escalation support through Engineering and Solution Design teams for complex infrastructure, platform, and architectural issues.
What We're Looking For
- Proven experience providing strategic leadership for engineering and architecture functions in a large, complex organization.
- Extensive background in managing workforce planning, recruitment, and professional development for technical teams.
- Demonstrated ability to build, develop, and lead multidisciplinary teams of architects and engineers.
- Strong expertise in leading the design and lifecycle management of cloud-ready and hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
- Deep knowledge of modern DevOps platforms, including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), container orchestration, and observability.
- Experience developing security and IAM architectures in collaboration with senior security leadership.
- Excellent communication and coordination skills to provide senior technical leadership across multiple programmes and domains.
Technical Stack
- Cloud-ready infrastructure
- Hybrid-cloud infrastructure
- Compute, Storage, Networking, Systems
- CI/CD
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Container orchestration
- Observability
- Automation toolchains
- Security architecture
- IAM architecture
Team & Environment
You will manage two organizational units: the Engineering Team and the Solution Design Competency Centre. The role sits within the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Executive Directorate, specifically the Technology and Engineering Sub-Directorate, and reports to the Chief Technology Officer.
Work Mode
This is an onsite position located at INTERPOL Headquarters in Lyon, France.
INTERPOL actively encourages applications from women and nationals of member countries that are currently unrepresented among our staff. INTERPOL’s recruitment process is merit-based.
