Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and motivate a team of approximately 4 to 6 software engineers and developers.
• Set clear expectations of knowledge, skills, and behaviours across levels from Graduate to Senior.
• Provide coaching, feedback, and structured development plans to support growth and performance.
• Build trusted relationships that enable open, honest communication and effective feedback.
• Conduct regular, calibrated performance reviews and act as a servant leader.
• Understand business goals, align engineering activity to those goals, and help the team understand strategic priorities.
• Partner with Product to ensure work is aligned to business objectives.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to align engineering delivery with broader business interests.
• Maintain transparent collaboration between engineering and other business functions.
• Track and analyse team-level metrics using frameworks such as DORA and SPACE.
• Educate the team on delivery and health metrics and use insights to drive continual improvement.
• Champion agile methodologies including Scrum, Kanban, and related practices.
• Support the scaling of effective ways of working across Engineering, Product, and Design.
• Foster a culture of reflection, learning, and best-practice sharing.
• Identify bottlenecks and drive improvement across the wider engineering function.
• Work with the team to design solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements.
• Ensure solutions align to architectural standards and progress through solution design review.
• Contribute to technical standards and the technical roadmap.
• Be accountable for key architectural decisions in collaboration with Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and the Chief Architect.
• Provide technical leadership across the core stack, with strong focus on Java and Spring for server-side development.
• Support development across web technologies, APIs, databases, testing practices, cloud and on-prem environments, CI/CD, and containerisation.
• Actively manage technical debt and make sound trade-offs between delivery speed and long-term quality.
• Ensure technical alignment to the agreed stack and system patterns, while enabling knowledge sharing across engineering.
• Champion the use of AI tooling across the software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through to coding, testing, review, and deployment.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted tools that improve productivity and quality.
• Encourage experimentation with emerging engineering capabilities and share learnings across the function.
• Promote a quality-first mindset and uphold clear standards for performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with Product and Design to define OKRs, estimate work, and plan delivery.
• Enable the team to deliver at a sustainable and predictable pace.
• Remove impediments quickly and escalate where necessary.
• Mentor the team in software delivery practices and lead delivery directly on key initiatives where appropriate.
• Manage timelines, risks, and resource allocation while balancing delivery efficiency with team capability growth.
• Work with Platform Engineering to monitor production components and ensure non-functional requirements are met.
• Prioritise operational issues and participate in the on-call rota for out-of-hours support.
• Evaluate the cost implications of technical decisions and balance technical quality, delivery timelines, and commercial considerations.
• Ensure adherence to Governance, Risk, and Compliance requirements within day-to-day team processes.
• Build team understanding of compliance and collaborate with GRC on policy clarity and improvement.
• Deliver solutions aligned to regulatory standards and organisational policies.
• Maintain strong security awareness across software and dependencies, support shift-left security practices, and contribute to security communities across engineering.
• Contribute beyond the immediate team by participating in engineering leadership initiatives, supporting engineering-wide hiring and talent strategy, and taking ownership of cross-functional programmes such as communities of practice, graduate development, and engineering-wide operational improvements.