Head of Talent

Head of Talent Department: People & Culture Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time Location: Bristol, UK Description We’re building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience. Rowden presents a unique opportunity for an ambitious talent leader. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Bristol, we set out to prove that mission-critical systems at the edge could be engineered better, deployed faster, and designed around the end user. Eight years on, we are a 150-person team and growing quickly, delivering operational capability to armed forces, first responders, and intelligence analysts operating in the most challenging environments. Our success has been driven by an exceptional team, a strong culture and a set of values rooted in pace, pragmatism, and measurable impact. Why This Role Exists Rowden is entering an inflection point that requires deliberate, long-term talent systems. As we continue to scale, we are: • Delivering larger, more complex programmes that require cross-disciplinary engineering leadership • Building and shipping integrated hardware and software products internationally • Scaling commercial leadership across new and existing markets and technologies • Designing the organisational structure, leadership team, and incentives to support a much larger business We cannot meet this challenge by reacting to vacancies, relying on job boards, or hiring from a fixed pool of known candidates. Instead, we need to proactively shape our workforce, ensuring our talent strategy directly enables contract delivery, product development and effective sales activity. This role exists to own that problem end-to-end. The Role As Head of Talent, you will lead Rowden’s talent strategy from first principles. You will be responsible for understanding the skills we have, the capabilities we need, and building a highly effective team around this over time. You will lead a high-impact internal talent function, with the authority to shape the team, tooling, and partnerships required to deliver results. Key areas of responsibility As Rowden’s Head of Talent, you will be responsible for: • Lead talent acquisition across engineering, product design, sales, and operational roles for national security and resilience. • Develop a forward-looking, data-driven strategy aligned to business growth, drawing from insights on the Southwest and national talent markets. • Design and maintain rigorous, but adaptable, recruitment processes, ensuring the bar remains high. • Personally run executive searches, helping to define the future leadership of the business. • Define where Rowden should hire directly versus where outsourcing or partnerships create better leverage. • Influence incentive structures to support talent attraction and retention. • Shape Rowden's employer brand and recruitment presence, including our website, job advertisements, career fairs, industry events, and social media channels. Key skills, experience and behaviours What Success Looks Like Within your first 12 months, you will have: • Developed a deep technical understanding of Rowden's workforce, including current strengths, capability gaps, and future needs tied directly to product and contract delivery. • Built close working relationships with engineering, product, and operational leaders and spent time with end users, to accurately represent to candidates our mission, culture, and capabilities. • Built a detailed understanding of the Southwest talent market while also expanding Rowden’s reach across the UK and internationally. • Designed clear talent pipelines for critical skills, spanning university partnerships, early-career programmes, experienced hires, and senior leadership roles. • Personally closed senior leadership hires and provided critical inputs to compensation structures across the organisation. • Identified opportunities where outsourcing or partnerships create leverage across talent access, speed to hire or cost. • Shaped Rowden’s recruitment brand and market presence, working with internal marketing and design teams. The breadth of this role is deliberate and therefore requires focus. You will need to prioritise ruthlessly based on business impact, sequence initiatives, and build mechanisms that scale over time. Success will come from trade-offs and judgment, not volume of activity. About You We are not looking for a conventional recruiter CV. We are looking for someone who can think from first principles, diagnose problems with rigour, and build systems that deliver results. You may have led Engineering, Operations, or another core function where hiring was mission-critical. You may have built high-performing teams under pressure and know what "great" looks like because you have run it yourself. Experience from outside talent can be an advantage, it brings commercial judgement, credibility with hiring managers, and a sharper performance bar. What matters is drive, analytical depth, and a clear ambition to build a world-class organisation. You will have: • A proven track record of building or leading high‑performing teams in high‑growth technology environments. • A strong grasp of engineering and technical roles - software, hardware, and systems engineering. • The analytical skills to combine instinct with data to inform decision‑making. • The ability to create scalable processes that reduce inefficiency and preserve pace. • Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills to represent Rowden externally to candidates and other stakeholders. • Confidence operating in fast-moving environments with ambiguity and complexity; problems often require definition and may change as you work through them. Working at Rowden We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are! We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants. Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible. Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!