Engineering Manager

Responsibilities:

Lead and develop people: Conduct regular 1:1s and performance reviews, provide actionable feedback, and create individual development plans with tech leads. Build trust within the team and support a healthy, collaborative working environment through open communication and thoughtful people management.

Build effective teams: Own hiring and onboarding, identify required competencies, and manage team composition, capacity, workload, and absence coverage. Create an environment built on trust, accountability, respectful communication, and continuous learning.

Set goals and delegate effectively: Translate business and product priorities into clear team goals, technical OKRs, and actionable plans. Delegate responsibilities with clear expectations and decision-making authority, supporting ownership.

Own planning and delivery: Coordinate prioritisation, estimation, sprint and release planning, and execution. Balance scope, capacity, dependencies, and quality to deliver predictable outcomes and communicate changes early.

Delivery methods maintenance and improvement: Work effectively within established Agile processes, ensuring consistent sprint planning, capacity management, and workload allocation. Track progress against commitments, address delivery risks, and continuously refine team practices using delivery metrics and team feedback.

Act proactively: Identify delivery risks, capability gaps, technical weaknesses, and operational issues before they escalate. Initiate corrective action, involve the right people, and follow through to resolution.

Drive technical development: Partner with the Lead Solutions Architect and tech leads to shape the technical roadmap, assess technical trade-offs, resolve complex blockers, and prioritise technical debt, modernisation, and automation alongside product work.

Ensure quality and reliability: Coordinate QA and release engineering capacity, strengthen testing and automation, and ensure production readiness through secure development and SRE practices. Monitor service quality and use incidents and release outcomes to drive improvements.

Support service operations: Organise on-call onboarding and schedules, coordinate incidents and escalations with L2 support, and ensure support teams understand team-owned services.

Collaborate: Keep engineering, product, DevOps, Security, and other stakeholders aligned on goals, progress, and risks. Maintain lightweight, useful processes, ensure adherence to engineering standards, and improve practices based on measurable outcomes and team feedback.

Report progress and align with the line manager: Keep the line manager informed of progress against the product and technical roadmaps, team goals, and delivery plans. Discuss risks, priorities, and resource needs, and contribute to technical strategy and planning.

Requirements:

At least 2–3 years of direct people management experience leading engineering teams (10+ team members)

7+ years of experience in software engineering across backend, frontend, or QA, including hands-on technical work and technical leadership.

Strong technical judgment and the ability to discuss architecture, engineering quality, and technical trade-offs with architects and tech leads.

Practical knowledge of Agile methods, with experience planning sprints, managing capacity and workload, and adapting delivery practices to team needs.

Ability to select and interpret engineering and delivery metrics, turn findings into concrete actions, and assess whether those actions improve outcomes.

Experience setting clear goals, defining success measures, delegating effectively, and holding people accountable while supporting their autonomy.

Empathetic people leadership: active listening, awareness of individual motivations and team dynamics, and confidence in handling difficult conversations and conflict.

A proactive approach to identifying risks and weaknesses, taking initiative, and driving issues through to resolution.

Experience partnering with Product Management to balance product priorities, technical investment, and available team capacity.

Understanding of secure software development, automated testing, release management, production monitoring, and incident response.

A collaborative approach grounded in respect, transparency, accountability, and openness to feedback.