Software Engineering Lead

Job description

Summary The Software Engineering Lead is a hands-on subject matter expert, engineering leader and people manager responsible for a cross-functional team delivering a defined set of products and services. This role combines technical leadership, delivery ownership, and people management . The Lead sets technical direction, ensures technical and operational excellence, and partners with Product to deliver business outcomes. Through their direct team; ensures designs have effective architectural and structural oversight, reliable products are delivered. As a peer to a Principal Software Engineer, this role is accountable for engineering outcomes (quality, reliability, security, compliance, cost, and speed) and for cultivating a high-performance, inclusive engineering culture. Analyses and aligns product roadmaps and determines the technical feasibility of future development projects. In addition will provide direction into delivery plans, schedules, raises risks and updated roadmaps. Accountable for ensuring good management to oversee and continuously improve the quality, service, and efficiency of staff, products and processes. Follows and enforces necessary compliance. Key Responsibilities Engineering Leadership & Culture Carry out management responsibilities in accordance with the organization’s policies, procedures, and applicable laws Build an inclusive, psychologically safe culture; resolve conflict constructively; model One-Team behaviours. Provides effective line management to direct reports and acts as an independent escalation point Conduct standard HR related duties such as absence management, performance management, disciplinaries, addressing complaints and resolving problem Participate in hiring processes, interviewing and develop onboarding plans of new team members Ensure all staff are provided with training and resources needed to perform their jobs to the most outstanding degree possible. Coach, mentor and support the professional development of individuals, provide with frequent feedback in order to meet and exceed individual and team performance goals consistently; fostering autonomy and ownership Product & Delivery Excellence Own delivery outcomes: predictability, throughput, quality, and customer value—using metrics (e.g., cycle time, lead time, escaped defects, change failure rate). Drive planning, capacity & dependency management; ensure delivery plans are feasible and transparent. Balance product growth opportunities with technical enablement (tech debt, reliability, security) using clear trade-off decisions. Serve as engineering voice in roadmap prioritisation and discovery; ensure requirements are clear, testable, and aligned to architecture constraints. Collaborate with direct reports and various stakeholders to support the development and maintenance of the technical roadmap, ensuring roadmap planning is well thought out technically and will be successful Proactively surface risks and mitigations; manage external dependencies and vendor/partner engagement. Serve as the initial point of escalation for software development issues within the specific area of responsibility leading on Manage and encourage new ideas from team members to foster improvements through innovations Interface with Product, UX, other technical personnel, or team members to finalise requirements Write and reviews portions of detailed specifications for the development of system components of moderate complexity Work closely with other development team members to understand moderately complex product requirements and translate them into software designs Ensure platform and features are compliant Technical Excellence & Innovation Align with domain/platform tech leads and the architecture function to drive standards, patterns, and reusability. Collaborate with team and domain tech leads on platform architecture, cross functional requirements and complex data models Ensure API and integration designs are robust, reliable and fault tolerant, versioned, observable, secure, and well-documented. Ensure sufficient & relevant technical documentation is available so that any staff can get up to speed quickly with the technical concerns of the product and services leading on Maintain a healthy technical estate: modernisation, simplification, deprecations; manage technical debt with a transparent backlog and guardrails, so that the technical burden is kept in equilibrium Provide technical assurance for the team: designs, code quality, reviews, and architectural alignment. Ensure security practices and standards are adopted within the team leading and acceptance criteria, with regular security testing is scheduled across all products and services leading on Ensure suitable dashboards are developed and enhanced to highlight technical concerns, risks and KPIs Keep abreast of new technology developments Lead system design at scale , using ADRs, C4 or similar; ensure architectural decisions are traceable and pragmatic. Champion modern design principles: SOLID, DDD, event-driven architectures, CQRS where appropriate. Operational Excellence Ensure zero/minimal downtime deployments (blue/green, canary); enforce release readiness and rollback plans. Ensure continuous improvement of engineering practices and operational processes Own operational readiness: instrumentation, logging, tracing, monitoring, alerts; production “run” quality. Define SLIs/SLOs/SLA and error budgets; drive MTTR, availability, and performance targets. Lead incident response and blameless post-incident reviews; ensure actionable follow-ups and learning loops Ensure software is maintained and upgrade as appropriate Maintain disaster recovery and business continuity (DR/BCP) plans and are well practiced; ensure compliance for resilience and recovery objectives (RPO/RTO). Ensure suitable testing is in place for all services and external interfaces managed are performant, scalable, fault tolerant, reliable and future capacity modelling is considered and performance targets are in defined Resolve complex technical issues and complete complex bug fixes as necessary Own cloud cost awareness (FinOps-lite): budgeting inputs, cost-to-serve, scaling policies, right-sizing, elasticity. Drive performance efficiency: load testing, capacity planning, caching strategies, and scalable architectures. Qualifications A polygot with a wide range of experience of different technologies and systems Proven experience as a Tech Lead / Lead Engineer delivering software at scale Strong organizational and project planning, time management and change management skills across functional groups Advanced problem solving and leading/co-ordinating people across teams as necessary to troubleshoot/diagnose complex project issues and get beyond symptoms to identifying root cause Focus more on the design and configuration of new systems to meet user requirements than on the implementation, technical support and evaluation of existing systems Demonstrable success leading cross-functional teams through full SDLC to production. Experience in systems analysis, design and a solid understanding of development, quality assurance and integration methodologies Experienced developing integrated solutions within a broad technical and business context of significant impact Experience balancing product delivery with technical investments (security, reliability, debt). Experienced in evaluating and participated in competitive analysis of 3rd party software and services Strong interpersonal communication and presentation skills Skilled in stakeholder management and communicating effectively at multiple levels (engineers → executives) Bachelor's or Master's Degree in a relevant field of work or equivalent work experience # Skills Advanced knowledge of agile software development methodologies (Scrum, XP, Pair programming, 3-Amigos, DevSecOps ) Expertise in various development languages and interfaces such as c#/.netcore, JavaScript (JQuery, ReactJS), Java, Node.Js, Python, Web, MVC, Restful APIs, GraphQL, CSS, Swagger Strong knowledge of SOLID Principles, KISS, YAGANI, Design patterns, Domain Modelling, DDD, CQRS, Event Driven Architectures, micro-services and message Queues, feature toggles, SOA, and software-as-a-service Broad knowledge of Continuous Testing, TDD / BDD, Integration Tests, Performance & Scalability Testing, Instrumentation (Logging, monitoring, alerting, metrics, health checks) Strong knowledge of relational and document based data stores, with strong understanding of normalised/dimensional data modelling principles and data manipulation languages including optimisation techniques Strong knowledge of OWASP Top 10, Security & Privacy By Design, SAST/DAST, Encryption, TLS, Secure Coding, Threat Modelling Strong knowledge of cloud based hosting, IaC, Immutable Infrastructure and container solutions, and cost/efficiency optimisations Strong knowledge of Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Source Control, Build Orchestration, Artefact Repositories, Static Analysis, powershell, green-blue deployments and canary releases. 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