Engineering Lead

The Engineering Lead is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding a cross-functional engineering squad in the delivery of high-quality, secure, reliable, and scalable software. Combining the responsibilities of a senior engineer with those of a team enabler, the role promotes strong engineering practices, effective delivery, and close collaboration with Product, Architecture, and Site Reliability Engineering teams.

The Engineering Lead also supports the Engineering Manager in scaling engineering excellence across multiple squads, while fostering a culture of aligned autonomy, continuous improvement, technical craftsmanship, and innovation. The role champions agentic development practices, promoting the effective use of autonomous and AI-assisted engineering tools to improve developer productivity, accelerate delivery, and enhance software quality.

The organisation is currently undertaking a significant redevelopment programme, replacing an underperforming PHP application with a highly optimised modular platform. A key responsibility of this role will be to lead the technical direction of this transformation, including driving architectural and technology decisions to ensure the new solution is performant, maintainable, resilient, and fit for long-term growth.

As we scale towards multiple autonomous squads, the Engineering Team Leader plays a crucial role in shaping the engineering culture at the team level, ensuring technical excellence, secure delivery, and strong collaboration across the organisation. You will set the pace, uphold engineering standards, and enable your team to deliver reliable and modern cloud-native services with confidence and autonomy.

This is a full time, permanent position working on a hybrid basis with 3 days per week in Manchester.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Delivery:

• Lead the squad in delivering high-quality software, ensuring adherence to secure-by-design and engineering best practices.
• Own the squad’s day-to-day technical direction, ensuring alignment with architectural patterns and technical strategy.
• Break down complex requirements into actionable engineering tasks and support backlog refinement.
• Drive predictable delivery through strong Agile practices, partnering with the Engineering Manager and Scrum Master.
• Conduct code reviews, lead design discussions, and champion technical excellence within the team.

Engineering Execution & Hands-On Contribution:

• Remain an active contributor to the codebase, setting the standard for code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Support troubleshooting, incident response, and root-cause analysis for squad-owned services.
• Promote best practices in cloud-native development, CI/CD, observability, and reliability engineering.
• Pair-program with engineers, provide technical mentoring, and encourage knowledge sharing.

Squad Leadership & Team Development:

• Foster a healthy team culture built on psychological safety, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Support squad members with coaching, onboarding, and day-to-day guidance, escalating people issues to the Engineering Manager when needed.
• Help identify skills gaps and support growth plans for engineers.
• Encourage learning, experimentation, and adoption of modern engineering practices.

Process Ownership & Continuous Improvement:

• Champion efficient engineering processes and development workflows within the squad.
• Ensure adherence to SDLC, coding standards, secure coding practices, and quality gates.
• Promote and facilitate retrospectives, driving actionable improvements.
• Help shape squad ceremonies and practices in partnership with Scrum Master and Product Owner.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Partner with the Solutions Architect to ensure architectural consistency and alignment with strategic design patterns.
• Work closely with the Lead SRE to embed reliability, observability, and CI/CD into day-to-day engineering workflows.
• Collaborate with Product Owners to refine requirements, manage scope, and support prioritisation.
• Communicate squad progress, risks, and technical challenges to the Engineering Manager and stakeholders.

Skills & Experience

• Proven experience as a senior engineer or tech lead within modern, cloud-native engineering environments.
• Agentic Development process and practice experience.
• Strong technical skills in modern development frameworks (e.g. Node.js, PHP, C#, .NET, React) and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure).
• Demonstrated ability to lead engineering practices such as code reviews, design sessions, testing, and CI/CD.
• Solid understanding of Agile delivery, DevOps principles, and secure software development practices. (Azure DevOps)
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to guide, mentor, and collaborate effectively across disciplines.
• Exposure to microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed system design.