Software Engineering Lead

Salary: £50,000 - 90,000 per year

Requirements:

• Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast-growing, regulated environments such as fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance.
• Deep expertise in at least one relevant engineering discipline, with solid breadth across design, build, test, and run.
• Track record of owning production systems end-to-end, including implementation, rollout, monitoring, incident response, and follow-up.
• Experience leading technical delivery on complex, ambiguous initiatives involving multiple engineers, dependencies, or teams.
• Strong architectural judgement and ability to evaluate trade-offs, set direction, and align others on pragmatic, maintainable solutions.
• Expertise in automated testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices in high-stakes production environments.
• Familiarity with observability and operational excellence, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and blameless learning from incidents.
• Understanding of security, compliance, and non-functional requirements in regulated financial services.
• Comfort working across modern and legacy systems and evolving platforms incrementally rather than through unnecessary rewrites.
• Ability to stay hands-on by contributing to code, designs, and reviews when that is the fastest way to reduce risk or unblock the team.
• Experience leading people, including coaching, mentoring, and supporting hiring.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels.
• Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines, reliability targets, and business needs.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership for one of our teams.
• Set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations, including production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling.
• Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers.
• Guide API and domain design standards, including service boundaries, consistent contracts, and pragmatic integration between modern services and legacy systems.
• Shape event-driven and integration patterns so teams can build independently without breaking cross-squad journeys.
• Champion automated testing, observability, and production readiness for backend services.
• Oversee database and schema evolution practices, including migrations, data integrity, and performance.
• Lead incident response for backend-owned systems, including triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality.
• Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, security, performance, and optimisation.
• Support production readiness for high-risk changes, including coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross-team dependencies.
• Lead delivery of complex, multi-team initiatives by managing dependencies, resources, and blockers.
• Define and drive technical strategy, improving engineering practices and delivery processes.
• Build strong partnerships across product, engineering, security, and business teams.
• Keep teams focused on priorities while balancing technical debt and operational needs.
• Drive collaboration across teams and lead cross-engineering initiatives with fellow Engineering Leads.
• Lead, coach, and mentor engineers to strengthen delivery and technical leadership.
• Stay hands-on when needed, contributing to designs, code, and operational improvements.
• Enhance developer experience through better tooling, documentation, and onboarding.
• Support hiring and help raise the bar for engineering talent.
• Empower teams to take ownership while providing guidance and direction where needed.

Technologies:

• API
• Backend
• CI/CD
• GraphQL
• Support
• PHP
• Security
• Datadog
• Frontend
• Mobile
• PHPUnit

More:

We are Cushon by WTW, and our mission is to help as many people as possible get comfortable with their finances. Our vision is to bring a tech revolution to the financial services industry. This Engineering Lead role includes line management responsibility for a team of 5-7 engineers, with support from an assigned Engineering Manager. We offer a benefits package designed to help you thrive, including 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day, private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, regular health assessments, a defined contribution pension scheme with matched contributions up to 10%, hybrid working options, an employee assistance programme, a fully paid volunteer day, and optional perks such as an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, and critical illness protection. We are committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview, and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants.

last updated 36 week of 2026