Software Engineering Manager

Job description

About the role We are looking for a Software Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for developing and delivering a large-scale, cloud-native observability and monitoring platform. The platform enables users to gain operational insights through dashboards, visualizations, search capabilities, workflows, APIs, and integrations across metrics, logs, traces, topology, and infrastructure monitoring data. The role is accountable for people leadership, delivery predictability, engineering quality, release readiness, technical execution, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. Working closely with Product Owners, Architects, SRE teams, and engineering stakeholders, the successful candidate will drive the delivery of scalable, reliable, secure, and user-centric platform capabilities while fostering a culture of engineering excellence and innovation. What you’ll be doing Manage, coach and develop a team of software engineers delivering new capabilities, creating a culture of ownership, inclusion, innovation and engineering excellence. Drive delivery of roadmap items with predictable sprint execution, clear commitments, active dependency management and transparent delivery metrics. Oversee technical decisions, technology choices and implementation approaches for services, UI workflows, APIs and integrations, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term platform maintainability. Ensure timely, high-quality releases by driving compliance with release quality metrics, test coverage, CI/CD standards, change governance and operational readiness. Partner with Product Owners, Architects, SRE, Platform Engineering and other Spotlight subsystem teams to translate product strategy into executable engineering plans. Drive engineering and operational excellence initiatives, including SDLC improvements, automation, code quality, technical debt reduction, observability of services and reliability improvements. Ensure all components are well-defined, modularised, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored and reusable across Spotlight where appropriate. Proactively remove delivery blockers, manage risks, resolve cross-team dependencies and escalate issues early when they impact roadmap or release commitments. Support implementation of new architectures, standards and methods for large-scale enterprise systems, ensuring team adoption through guidance, reviews and governance. Use metrics and data analysis to identify delivery bottlenecks, quality issues, user experience gaps and opportunities to improve engineering productivity. Lead or support complex debugging and troubleshooting of critical issues throughout development, test, release and production lifecycle. Coordinate evaluation and adoption of high-quality tools and automation practices to improve developer productivity, test automation and continuous delivery. Own performance management, goal setting, feedback, hiring support, onboarding, capability building and succession planning for the engineering team. Champion emerging trends in software engineering, cloud-native delivery, observability platforms, user experience engineering and AI-assisted engineering practices where relevant. Act as an influencer in the wider Spotlight engineering community, contributing to product quality, technology governance, engineering standards and cross-team collaboration. Essential Skills / Experience Proven experience of managing software engineering teams delivering enterprise platforms, cloud-native applications or large-scale product capabilities. Strong Agile delivery experience with sprint planning, backlog refinement, dependency management, metrics, risk management and release predictability. Strong SDLC knowledge including design, development, code review, testing, release, operations, incident learnings and continuous improvement. Hands-on or leadership-level understanding of CI/CD pipelines, test automation, deployment governance, release quality gates and developer productivity tooling. Good understanding of microservices, service-oriented architecture, REST APIs, integration patterns and modular platform design. Cloud-native engineering understanding including containers, Kubernetes-based deployment models, scalable services and operational readiness. Ability to lead engineering quality across unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, performance testing, security considerations and production support readiness. Ability to work with architects and senior engineers to evaluate technical trade-offs relating to scalability, reliability, performance, maintainability, user experience and cost. Experience driving technical debt reduction, code quality improvements, refactoring plans and continuous engineering improvement without losing delivery focus. Strong people leadership skills including coaching, performance management, capability building, inclusive leadership and talent development. Strong stakeholder management and communication skills across Product, Architecture, SRE, Platform Engineering, delivery leadership and partner teams. Working knowledge of observability concepts such as metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, service health, topology and operational workflows. Awareness of frontend/user experience engineering for dashboards, portals, workflows or visualisation-heavy products. Angular or similar frontend awareness is useful. Ability to debug complex issues, coordinate incident response, drive root cause analysis and ensure preventive actions are implemented. Growth mindset with ability to improve operating models, engineering culture, release discipline and customer/user outcomes. Work experience of Java/Spring Boot, Python/Go, Angular, PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, Kafka, Grafana/Kibana or similar technology stacks. Experience working with SRE practices, operational dashboards, SLIs/SLOs, incident management, post-incident reviews and reliability improvement plans. Understanding secure application delivery including RBAC, tenant isolation, secrets, certificates, vulnerability management and compliance-driven environments. Desirable Skills / Experience Exposure to observability or monitoring platforms in telecom, cloud, infrastructure or enterprise IT environments. Experience with dashboards, analytics, topology, workflow or self-service platform user journeys. Experience with infrastructure automation, deployment automation or DevOps practices such as GitLab CI, Terraform, Ansible or equivalent tools. BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers. BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive. Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best. We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.