Head of Engineering, DiSSCo UK

About Us

We are a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. We use the Museum's unique collections and our unrivalled expertise to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today. We care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years and welcome more than five million visitors annually and 16 million visits to our website.  

Today the Museum is more relevant and influential than ever. By attracting people from a range of backgrounds to work for us, we can continue to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new ways of doing things.

We employ 1100 staff in a variety of roles, all united by our vision of a future where people and planet thrive. We need everyone to have the passion and drive to help us with our mission to create advocates for our planet and inspire millions to care about the natural world.

Diversity and inclusion matter to us.

Our vision is of a future where both people and the planet thrive. Diversity is one of our core values and we strive to build a workplace where everyone feels a sense of belonging. All new staff who join us learn about the importance of diversity and inclusion to the Museum and how to contribute to creating an inclusive environment.

We know we have more to do, but we are committed to ensuring that everyone who works at the Museum feels they can thrive and feel valued and respected.

About DiSSCo UK

The UK's natural science collections, comprising over 140 million items, are a vital global resource holding unique data on Earth's history and natural systems. However, their potential to address critical issues like biodiversity and climate change is limited by physical access and fragmented digitization efforts, with less than 10% currently available digitally. To unlock this potential, DiSSCo UK (Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK, https://www.dissco-uk.org/) — a consortium of over 90 UK natural science collections led by the Natural History Museum — is developing a national infrastructure as part of the UKRI Infrastructure Roadmap. This 10-year program, expected to receive around £155 million in investment, will focus on digitising a critical mass of collections into FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data, supported by robust technology and innovative approaches like AI and robotics. Having already mobilized over 16 million records, DiSSCo UK aims to significantly accelerate digitisation from 2026, creating an unprecedented resource that promises substantial economic returns, efficiency savings for researchers, and groundbreaking research opportunities for a thriving future for both people and planet.

About the role

As Head of Engineering, you will provide strategic technical leadership for the infrastructure required to deliver the DiSSCo UK programme, working at the intersection of science, data, and large-scale digital services. This is a rare opportunity to shape the national digital platform that will underpin the UK’s contribution to DiSSCo and unlock the potential of over 140 million natural science collection items.

You will act as the technical authority for platform architecture and underlying infrastructure, leading the design and integration of a secure, sustainable, and scalable ecosystem. This will combine procured cloud-based services, delivered in partnership with AHRC/UKRI and commercial suppliers, with bespoke, mission-critical components developed in-house. You will own the technical roadmap across built and bought services, ensuring architectural coherence, interoperability and alignment with programme standards.

Your focus will be on integrating the full infrastructure: cloud environments, storage solutions, data mobilisation pipelines, publishing workflows and access platforms into a unified national system. You will work closely with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) as the primary access service, acting as a key technical partner in delivering globally discoverable biodiversity data.

Based within the Natural History Museum’s Digital, Data and Informatics department, you will build and lead a high-performing engineering team, providing both technical and people leadership as the programme scales. This role offers the opportunity to influence critical architectural decisions from the ground up and to deliver infrastructure with lasting national and international impact.

About you

We are looking for an accomplished engineering leader who thrives on delivering complex, high-impact digital infrastructure (potentially with a start-up or research software background). If you enjoy setting architectural direction, owning technical roadmaps, and guiding large-scale platforms from specification to delivery, this is the role for you.

You bring experience leading small, high-performing engineering teams and working in partnership with programme leadership, external suppliers and managed service providers to turn vision into delivery. You are confident operating as the technical authority within a multi-partner programme, making key design decisions, resolving trade-offs, and ensuring solutions are secure, scalable and standards-compliant.

You value collaboration as much as technical excellence. You communicate complex technical concepts with clarity, build credibility with senior stakeholders and multidisciplinary teams, and ensure architectural coherence across diverse organisations and varying levels of technical maturity.

Motivated by impact and legacy, you are excited by the opportunity to shape a nationally significant research infrastructure from its formative stages. You enjoy building and developing high-performing teams, setting engineering best practice, and delivering robust, user-centred solutions that will support the UK research and biodiversity community for years to come.

This role could suit a current or former startup CTO, Principal Engineer, or technical founder who has built and scaled digital platforms and teams in complex environments.

Thriving at the Museum: the way we work

We are proud to work at the Museum and have identified the qualities we all need to embody to reach our shared ambition. This sits alongside the Museum’s values and forms the framework for the way we work.

Find out more here

What we offer

• 27.5 days holiday plus 8 bank holidays (full time equivalent)
• Generous defined contribution Natural History Museum Pension Scheme (employer contribution 4 - 10%)
• Season ticket, bicycle and rental loan
• Life insurance
• Free admission to our exhibitions and many other paid exhibitions at museums, galleries and institutions across London and the UK.
• Staff discount at our Museum shops and cafes
• We offer a wide variety of training initiatives and opportunities to build skills. Investing in staff development is important to us, and we are ambitious about helping staff to grow and fulfil their potential.
• Affordable membership to the Civil Service Sports Council which offers a range of benefits including an extensive list of special offers and reduced entry fees at a selection of cinema chains, theme parks, theatres, retailers and supermarkets. It also provides entry to up to 300 English Heritage sites and other national treasures. For more details, visit https://www.cssc.co.uk
• Membership to our Sports and Social Association (for a small fee), which includes access to our in-house gym and clubs such as football, softball, table tennis and tennis and classes in Middle Eastern dance, yoga and Tai Chi

Hybrid working

We are working towards a vision where both people and planet thrive, and nothing gives a greater connection with this, than seeing first-hand, the visitors, scientific research and collections that all of our work is inspired by and working side by side with the teams delivering the visitor experience and events.  We also recognise the benefits and flexibility that hybrid working brings. We operate a hybrid working model that requires regular, weekly attendance for this role, with the precise pattern of days on site and worked from home to be agreed with your manager.