Lead Engineer

Description:

As Lead Engineer, you will combine hands-on technical contribution with the day-to-day leadership and people management of a software engineering squad within our new engineering team. You will work alongside your team, writing and reviewing code, guiding technical decisions, maintaining engineering standards, supporting the growth of individual engineers, and acting as the connective tissue between your squad and the broader engineering organisation. You'll work closely with the Director of Engineering and leaders from adjacent disciplines to ensure your team’s work aligns with our technical direction and product priorities.

You'll lead with empathy and clarity to foster a culture of continuous improvement, shared ownership, and engineering excellence within your squad. Team leadership roles are vital to our success so you will play a key role in helping to create a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment that is psychologically safe, where everyone can be their authentic selves and do their best work, every day.

Your Role

Grow your team

Support your engineers’ career development and build a motivated, high-performing squad through regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and by creating individual growth plans.

Mentor junior and mid-level engineers – fostering a continuous improvement culture and helping the team build technical confidence and skills.

Contribute technically

Write and review code as an active contributor to your squad’s delivery – guiding by example on quality, maintainability, and best practice.

Guide architectural decisions and technical direction within your squad and contribute to broader engineering discussions.

Drive delivery and planning

Plan and manage squad capacity across projects – forecast hiring needs and allocating resources effectively to meet delivery commitments.

Participate in roadmap, refinement, and sprint planning sessions – working closely with Product colleagues and adjacent discipline leads, providing technical input, ensuring clear scoping, and surfacing dependencies and risks early.

Uphold engineering standards

Define and sustain coding standards and review processes – conducting code reviews focused on quality, maintainability, and consistency.

Track and manage technical debt within your squad – balancing debt reduction with feature delivery and escalating systemic issues where needed.

Ensure operational excellence

Participate in the in-hours and out-of-hours incident management rotas, providing hands-on technical support and clear, calm communication during high-pressure situations.

Advocate for the ‘you build it, you run it’ ethos – ensuring your squad is equipped to deploy, operate, and support the systems they build as part of a DevOps culture where second line out of hours support is the expectation.

What We're Looking For

Experience of some but not necessarily all of the following:

Technical capability

Solid hands-on software engineering experience, with sufficient depth across frontend and backend development to guide technical decisions, review code meaningfully, and set the standard for your squad.

Able to lead a team across our core stack — a Java Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes and Kafka back end, with a TypeScript/React front end — deep expertise in some areas, with the breadth to engage credibly across the rest.

A strong grasp of software architecture principles — domain-driven design, service boundaries, and event-driven communication (e.g. via Kafka) — and the ability to guide your squad's technical direction within a broader engineering strategy.

Modern engineering practices: CI/CD, containerisation, version control workflows, code review, testing strategies, and observability.

Security best practices embedded across the development lifecycle, with the ability to guide your squad to do the same.

An awareness of AI trends within engineering and an interest in AI-assisted development tooling – understanding how these tools can improve your squad's productivity and code quality.