Engineering Lead

The Opportunity

This is an opportunity to join IRIS Software Group as we transform into an AI-first company delivering cloud-native solutions that impact millions of lives globally. IRIS produces an integrated suite of mission-critical software applications spanning accountancy, HR, payroll, education, and business operations. You will be working as part of an Agile team to deliver innovative solutions to user stories and requirements, contributing to our modernisation journey that serves over 100,000 customers across 135 countries.

The role is challenging and dynamic, with key deadlines to be met as we accelerate our cloud transformation and implement next-generation technologies. You’ll need to embrace continuous learning and bring a focused attitude to tasks that directly enable businesses, schools, and organisations to work smarter and more efficiently.

You will be involved in a variety of cutting-edge technical solutions, ranging from the latest .NET technologies using C# to various Front End Web JS Frameworks, all while contributing to our AI-powered platform evolution. You will be supported in your career growth by a highly experienced team, comprehensive learning opportunities, and a vibrant technical community committed to creating exceptional solutions that make a real difference in how our customers operate and succeed.

Role Purpose

The Engineering Lead is a hybrid leadership role that combines technical leadership, agile delivery ownership, and people management. You will lead an autonomous engineering team building modern full-stack web applications using the latest UI frameworks, .NET Core backends, and cloud-native technologies, ensuring both delivery excellence and team development while remaining technically hands-on with containerised, scalable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Delivery Management (25%)

• Ensure projects are scoped, prioritised, and delivered on time with clear alignment to business goals and quarterly OKRs
• Drive predictability, velocity, and quality through effective agile practices and continuous improvement
• Communicate proactively with stakeholders (product, design, leadership, customers) on delivery progress, risks, and dependencies
• Facilitate alignment between technical capabilities and business objectives through clear, strategic communication
• Own team’s Agile maturity, establish team delivery standards, and optimise team practices for maximum effectiveness and predictability
• Balance workload, staffing, and hiring needs to maintain sustainable delivery while planning for growth
• Manage up and across the organisation to secure resources, remove impediments, and represent the team strategically

Technical Leadership & Contribution (50%)

• Provide strategic technical leadership through architectural guidance and critical technical decisions, with selective hands-on contributions
• Define technical decisions and maintain system health through architectural oversight and technical debt management
• Establish and drive comprehensive quality culture including TDD/BDD practices, testing standards, automated quality gates, and team code review excellence
• Define team security standards ensure team compliance governance, and drive security-first culture within the engineering team
• Stay technically current through code reviews, architectural discussions, strategic technical involvement and ensure alignment with broader organisational technical strategy
• Delegate technical execution to senior team members while maintaining oversight and accountability
• Define AI strategy and ensure responsible AI culture across teams
• Empower team decision-making within established frameworks and escalation criteria
• Define team documentation strategy establish governance frameworks for the team, and ensure knowledge management within the engineering team

People Management (25%)

• Line manage engineers including coaching, performance reviews, career planning, and regular 1:1s
• Create inclusive, collaborative environment that enables team success by removing blockers and providing resources
• Develop team members through structured career development, skill building, and succession planning
• Handle performance management including improvement plans, conflict resolution, and team dynamics

Required Experience & Skills

Technical Skills

• Frontend Strategy: Strategic understanding of modern UI frameworks (e.g. Angular, React, Vue.js, Blazor)
• Backend Leadership: Strong understanding of .NET Core, C#, ASP.NET Core Web APIs, REST, application architectures, and distributed systems
• Data Architecture: Strategic knowledge of SQL, NoSQL and data architecture decisions
• Agentic AI Engineering: Demonstrated experience using AI coding agents (Cursor, Copilot, Devin, Claude Code, etc.) as a primary development workflow — not as a productivity add-on. Able to define team guardrails, review AI-generated output critically, and lead a team culture where agentic development is the default mode of working.
• Prompt engineering and AI workflow design: Experience designing effective AI interactions through prompt engineering, context management, and MCP integration — with the ability to coach team members on getting high-quality, production-safe output from AI agents.
• CI/CD Strategy: Define team CI/CD strategy, establish team governance frameworks, and ensure adoption of deployment best practices across the team
• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, ARM Templates or AWS CloudFormation/CDK
• Observability Strategy: DataDog, Application Insights or Amazon CloudWatch implementation with comprehensive observability strategy and cloud governance
• Cloud Strategy: Strategic SAAS using Azure (Functions, Queue, Blob Storage, VMs, etc) or AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, EC2, etc.) ecosystems
• Container Orchestration: Advanced Container (e.g. Docker) and Kubernetes (AKS/EKS) with production-scale deployments
• Architecture Governance: Expertise in clean architecture, domain-driven design, and application architectural patterns
• Scalable Solutions: Experience with highly scalable solutions and internet-facing traffic levels
• Quality & Testing Leadership: Define team testing strategy, establish quality governance for the team, and measure team adoption with continuous improvement initiatives
• Application Security: Confident vulnerability management, thread modelling and tracking
• Production Support: Knowledge of observability and production support practices

Experience Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering, minimum 1 year of formal people management experience OR 2+ years of technical leadership with mentoring responsibilities
• Demonstrable experience delivering complex software projects using Agile methodologies
• Proven recent technical skills with strategic contributions to production systems
• Code review leadership with experience establishing review standards and culture
• Demonstrated ability to balance technical excellence with business delivery requirements

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills
• Effective prioritisation and negotiation abilities
• Strong analytical and strategic thinking capabilities
• Ability to balance technical excellence with business delivery requirements
• Fostering collaboration, promoting team building and culture development skills

Desirable Skills

• Experience working with regulated or complex domains (finance, health, govtech) with audit requirements
• Experience line managing engineers including 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development
• Experience with platform engineering or shared service teams building reusable UI components and backend services
• Expertise with advanced monitoring and APM strategies using DataDog, including custom dashboards and alerting
• Advanced understanding of modern UI architecture patterns (micro-frontends, SSR/SSG)
• Experience as Engineering Lead, Tech Lead, or similar leadership role with full-stack teams
• Exposure to DevOps processes and automation ensuring end-to-end responsibility of features
• Advanced cloud certifications in Azure or AWS

Success Measures

• Delivery Excellence: Sprint goals achieved, predictable releases, strong velocity, and minimal carry-over
• Technical Leadership: High team code quality, effective architecture decisions, reduced technical debt, improved scalability, and proactive tooling adoption
• Strategic Leadership: Selective technical contributions to critical decisions with effective delegation
• AI adoption: Team is operating with agentic AI tooling embedded in daily workflow, with measurable impact on delivery velocity and code quality
• Quality Excellence: Team adoption of automated TDD/BDD and code review practices with effective quality gates and measurable quality improvements
• People Development: Autonomous team with strong ownership, positive engagement scores, clear development objectives, low attrition, and active succession planning
• Cross-Functional Impact: Strong collaboration with Product, Design, and Platform teams, supported by positive stakeholder feedback
• Business Alignment: Quarterly OKRs/KPIs achieved or exceeded with clear business impact

Benefits & Why Join IRIS

Compensation & Benefits:

- Competitive salary with leadership premium

- Generous holiday allowance

- Private medical healthcare

- Life assurance - Pension (location dependent)

Professional Development:

- Executive leadership development programs

- Conference speaking and industry thought leadership opportunities

- Advanced technical and management training

- Mentorship from senior engineering leadership

- Opportunity to shape engineering culture and practices

Culture & Environment:

- Great Place to Work certified with leadership recognition

- Best Workplaces for Women with inclusive leadership focus

- Autonomous team leadership with strategic impact

- Flexible working arrangements and excellent work-life balance

- Opportunity to build and lead high-performing engineering teams

- Additional benefits: Cycle to Work, charity days, discount schemes