Role PurposeThis is a hands-on leadership role combining technical direction, agile delivery ownership and people management for one autonomous team building and maintaining document capture, storage, workflow and retrieval capabilities embedded in our accountancy product suite. Approximately 40% delivery, 40% technical, 20% people.
Main ResponsibilitiesDelivery Management (40%)- Scope, sequence and deliver against quarterly OKRs, with commitments the team can actually meet and few surprises along the way
- Own stakeholder communication on progress, risk and dependencies across Product, Compliance and leadership
- Raise release cadence and predictability - our direction of travel is a production deployment every sprint, moving towards on demand
- Balance workload and staffing across the team to keep delivery sustainable
Technical Leadership & Contribution (40%)- Own architecture and technical decisions for document ingestion, storage, retrieval and integration at scale
- Set and enforce security standards for sensitive client and financial data: encryption in transit and at rest, access control, retention and audit trail
- Drive engineering quality - automated testing, code review standards, CI/CD and observability - and hold the line on it under delivery pressure
- Manage technical debt deliberately: a prioritised, funded plan rather than a backlog nobody reads
- Adopt AI tooling into the team's engineering workflow responsibly, and measure whether it is genuinely helping
People Management (20%)- Line manage engineers: 1:1s, performance reviews, career development, and the difficult conversations when they are needed
- Grow senior engineers into technical leaders and delegate real accountability to them
- Own team health and engagement - act on it rather than simply reporting it
Key RelationshipsInternal: Document Management and Platform engineering teams, Accountancy Product Management, Compliance and Security, QA, DevOps. External: offshore engineering partners, Professional Services, Customer Support, third-party vendors. Leadership: Associate Director of Engineering, VP Engineering, Product leadership.
Success in the First Twelve Months- Delivery: predictable sprint outcomes, minimal carry-over, release cadence improved to the agreed target
- Quality: change failure rate and escaped defects trending down; no critical or high severity vulnerabilities carried in production
- Technical health: agreed modernisation milestones delivered alongside roadmap commitments
- Team: every engineer with a clear development plan, low unplanned attrition, and at least one named successor for key roles
2. Qualifications & ExperienceTechnical Skills- Depth in .NET and C# with ASP.NET Core Web APIs and distributed systems, plus working fluency in a modern UI framework (React, Angular, Vue or Blazor)
- Production cloud experience with containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines you have personally built or owned - Azure preferred, as our platform runs entirely on Azure, though strong AWS experience transfers well
- Sound judgement across relational and non-relational data stores, and the reasoning to choose between them
- Application security in practice: vulnerability management, threat modelling and dependency hygiene
- Observability that is actually used, and production support experience under real incident pressure - Datadog preferred, Application Insights also welcome
Experience- Evidence of shipping through a team: 6+ years in software engineering, plus either formal line management or sustained technical leadership of a delivery team
- Track record delivering complex projects in an Agile environment, balancing technical excellence against delivery timelines
- Experience modernising established codebases without stopping delivery
- Effective working across distributed and offshore teams in different timezones
Desirable- Document, content or records management systems, including OCR and search or indexing pipelines
- Regulated or audit-heavy domains - finance, legal, govtech - with SOC 2 or equivalent
- Platform or shared-services engineering
- Practical AI integration work, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent tooling
- Advanced Azure certification (or AWS equivalent)
3. Competencies- Leads several workstreams at pace without letting security or data-integrity discipline slip
- Communicates and negotiates credibly across engineering, Product and Compliance, and upwards to leadership
- Decides with incomplete information, and revisits decisions when the evidence changes
- Balances technical excellence against delivery reality without defaulting to either
- Self-starter who owns outcomes end to end and builds team culture deliberately
