Overview:
The Engineering Manager is responsible for leading and coaching Agile engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and high-quality software aligned to business and product objectives. The role oversees team performance, software delivery, engineering standards, and system reliability, while working closely with cross-functional teams across product, architecture, DevOps, data, and quality engineering.
The role combines strong people leadership with technical oversight, ensuring teams make sound engineering decisions, deliver efficiently, maintain high quality standards, and continuously improve systems, processes, and team capability.
Experience and Skills Required:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- Strong understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns, distributed systems concepts, and modern development best practices.
- Good knowledge of Agile delivery methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and iterative product development.
- Working knowledge of cloud-native architectures, microservices, APIs, CI/CD, observability, and software delivery controls.
- Understanding of how to manage and modernise mixed technology estates spanning bespoke applications, packaged platforms, vendor-supported solutions, integrations, and shared enterprise services.
- Understanding of software quality, testing strategies, operational readiness, security, and reliability in production systems.
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in an engineering leadership or management role.
- Proven track record of leading engineering teams to deliver high-quality software products in a fast-paced, product-oriented environment.
- Experience in people management, including performance management, coaching, mentoring, and developing high-performing teams.
- Hands-on technical background with experience in designing, building, deploying, and supporting software applications and services.
- Experience collaborating with product managers, architects, and business stakeholders to prioritise work and execute against a roadmap.
- Experience with engineering planning, delivery management, estimation, dependency management, and resource allocation.
- Experience with modern engineering toolchains such as Jira, Git, CI/CD platforms, monitoring, and incident management tooling.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, and with contemporary DevOps and release management practices.
- Experience with microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven systems, and scalable distributed platforms.
- Experience overseeing engineering delivery and operational support across multiple systems, including custom-built and off-the-shelf solutions, with an ability to balance platform constraints, integration requirements, commercial considerations, and business priorities.
- Experience driving software quality through code review, testing discipline, automation, and measurable engineering standards.
- Experience implementing best-practice AI usage within the development space, including policy, governance, tooling selection, secure usage patterns, prompt and output review discipline, and practical adoption that improves productivity without compromising quality, security, compliance, or intellectual property.
- AI & data analytics proficiency essential.
Beneficial:
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Business, or a related field.
- Professional certifications in leadership, Agile delivery, cloud architecture, or engineering management.
Responsibilities:
- Agile Delivery Leadership: Drive and coach Agile teams to deliver against sprint goals, engineering standards, backlog commitments, and roadmap outcomes while maintaining predictable, high-quality execution.
- People Management: Lead and manage software engineers through goal setting, regular feedback, performance reviews, coaching, career development, and succession planning.
- Product Partnership: Collaborate closely with product managers, architects, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate business priorities into clear engineering plans and team objectives.
- Technical Leadership: Contribute to architecture and key design decisions for current and future services, ensuring solutions are maintainable, resilient, secure, and aligned to engineering guardrails.
- Code Quality and Engineering Standards: Ensure strong software engineering practices including code reviews, automated testing, secure coding, documentation, and adherence to development standards.
- Technology Roadmap: Drive execution of the engineering and technology roadmap for the team, balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term platform sustainability.
- Process Improvement: Continuously improve team processes, delivery practices, and workflows through feedback, metrics, retrospectives, and pragmatic experimentation.
- Technical Debt Management: Own and prioritise the remediation of technical debt, reliability risks, performance bottlenecks, and legacy components that slow delivery or reduce quality.
- Cloud and Platform Practices: Support modern engineering practices across cloud-native systems, CI/CD, observability, incident readiness, and operational excellence.
- System Estate Management: Lead engineering ownership across a portfolio of systems that may include bespoke software, third-party platforms, SaaS products, and off-the-shelf solutions, ensuring appropriate lifecycle management, integration quality, vendor engagement, operability, security, and fit-for-purpose evolution.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with QA, DevOps, platform, data, security, and support teams to ensure solutions are thoroughly tested, deployed safely, monitored effectively, and supported in production.
- Operational Ownership: Be accountable for the health and supportability of the team’s services, ensuring incidents, defects, stakeholder issues, and production risks are managed in a timely and disciplined manner.
