Software Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Line-manage and coach engineers, fostering professional growth through regular feedback, career planning and performance reviews;
• promote an inclusive, supportive team culture;
• own delivery outcomes for assigned teams: set clear objectives, manage capacity and priorities, and ensure features and platform work are delivered to quality, on schedule and with measurable outcomes;
• provide technical guidance and decision support; participate in architecture reviews, design discussions and codebase improvements to maintain healthy, evolvable systems;
• collaborate with product managers, designers and stakeholders to define priorities, refine requirements and balance technical debt with new development;
• drive engineering best practices including code reviews, testing strategies, CI/CD, observability and release processes to increase reliability and delivery predictability;
• identify, track and mitigate technical risks and dependencies across teams; escalate appropriately and coordinate remediation with engineering leads and architects;
• promote continuous improvement through retrospectives, metrics (lead time, cycle time, quality indicators) and process optimisation;
• recruit and onboard talent to grow capability; contribute to hiring decisions, interview processes and induction programmes;
• champion diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring, mentoring and day-to-day team practices.

Essential Skills and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience;
• proven experience (typically 7+ years) in software engineering with a minimum of 2–3 years in a people management or technical lead role;
• strong technical literacy across modern web/cloud tech stacks, microservices, APIs and deployment patterns; able to engage constructively with senior engineers and architects;
• practical knowledge of agile environments, with experience in sprint planning, backlog management and release coordination;
• excellent interpersonal and stakeholder management skills; able to communicate trade-offs and build consensus across technical and non-technical audiences;
• experience with delivery and engineering tooling such as Git, CI/CD pipelines, issue tracking (e.g. Jira), and collaboration platforms (e.g. Confluence);
• proven ability to hire, mentor and retain engineering talent and to foster a collaborative, psychologically safe team environment;
• strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to produce clear engineering artefacts including runbooks, post-mortems and technical roadmaps.

Desirable Skills

• previous experience managing platform, infrastructure or API-centric engineering teams;
• familiarity with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), infrastructure as code and observability tooling;
• knowledge of security and compliance considerations relevant to public sector or regulated environments;
• experience contributing to engineering playbooks, internal training or community of practice initiatives;
• professional certifications in leadership, agile or cloud technologies are advantageous.