Software Engineering Lead

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.

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

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

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.

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.