Software Engineering Lead

Description

Ready to shape engineering at scale? As our Engineering Lead, you’ll drive the platforms and tooling that help teams deliver faster, safer, and smarter.

Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances.
Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. Learn more here – https://www.cushon.co.uk/about

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead to provide technical leadership for one of our teams. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations – the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

The Role

Technical Leadership

Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers – balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability
Guide API and domain design standards – clear 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 – PHPUnit, Go tests, Datadog, and safe release practices
Oversee database and schema evolution practices – migrations, data integrity, and performance – in partnership with platform and infrastructure teams
Lead incident response for backend-owned systems – triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality
Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, Security, Performance and Optimisation – raising the bar through design review and hands-on contribution when needed
Support production readiness for high-risk changes – coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross-team dependencies at the legacy/modern boundary

Delivery Leadership

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.

People & Developer experience

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

Qualifications

What you’ll bring

Leadership & delivery

Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines, reliability targets, and business needs
Expertise in championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality, and operational stability
Skill in reviewing and contributing to technical designs that meet quality and security standards
Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels
Capability to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership
Strategic and tactical decision-making abilities
Commitment to creating an empowering team environment that prioritises customer experience and engineering productivity

Technical experience

Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast-growing, regulated environments (fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance)
Deep expertise in at least one engineering discipline relevant to your squad – backend, frontend, mobile, quality, or platform operations – with solid breadth across design, build, test, and run
Track record of owning production systems end-to-end: 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 – evaluating trade-offs, setting direction, and aligning 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 – monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and blameless learning from incidents
Understanding of security, compliance, and non-functional requirements in regulated financial services
Comfortable working across modern and legacy systems – evolving the platform incrementally rather than through unnecessary rewrites
Ability to stay hands-on – contributing to code, designs, and reviews when that is the fastest way to reduce risk or unblock the team

What we offer

Enjoy a benefits package designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally. You’ll receive 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day to relax and recharge. Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind. Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company.

We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community. On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more. Start making the most of your career and wellbeing with a range of benefits tailored for you.

Equal Opportunity Employer
We’re committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants. If you foresee any barriers, from the application process through to joining WTW, please email candidatehelpdesk@wtwco.com

Software Engineer

About CircleCI Engineering

CI/CD has been solved. Now it’s being reinvented. AI agents don’t just run pipelines. They write code, trigger builds, interpret failures, and propose fixes. The interfaces that developers use to understand and trust that work don’t exist yet. We’re building them.

At CircleCI, our guiding principles aren’t posters on a wall. We learn fast: we run experiments, accept failure, and scale what works. We think like the customer: every decision connects back to the developer sitting in front of a failing build at 2 am. We own the outcome: not just our slice of it, but the whole thing. If that’s how you already work, you’ll fit here.

Team-Agnostic Placement

We don’t hire for a team. We hire for CircleCI. Where you land depends on where your strengths create the most leverage, and we figure that out together. You might own the CI pipeline experience, deploy and release tooling, notification infrastructure, monetization flows, AI agent surfaces, or the foundational web platform. The through line across all of it is the same: full-stack ownership, a high bar for craft, and work that directly shapes how tens of thousands of developers experience CircleCI every day.

What You’ll Do

Build AI-natively. AI is how we work. It’s not a productivity layer on top of engineering, but the default starting point for how problems get approached and solved.
Invent new interfaces. Software delivery is being reinvented. Pipelines run autonomously, generate fixes, and surface results that need human judgment. The tools developers use to understand, trust, and act on that work don’t exist yet. You’ll define what they look like.
Obsess over craft. Reliability and responsiveness are design concerns, not afterthoughts. Care about how the interface holds up when stakes are high.
Champion observability. Use Honeycomb, Datadog, and Rollbar to understand and improve your systems. Operational data drives stability, not just incident response.
Pick up slack. You’ll notice gaps and close them — not because you were asked, but because that’s the standard we hold ourselves to.

What You’ll Bring

AI-native engineering practices. You use AI tools daily and can speak to what you’ve built, where they changed your approach, and where they fall short.
A track record of shipping. You’ve built something real and put it in front of users. 3+ years of production full-stack, backend leaning experience.
Backend depth. Strong backend expertise in Go, including API design, data modeling, and service integration, with the ability to contribute across the stack when needed.
System design. You think about architecture, not just features. You make conscious tradeoffs and document your reasoning.
Production mindset. Latency, responsiveness, and reliability are design concerns. You’re comfortable operating services in a distributed environment.

Sound like you?

You’ve stopped waiting for AI to mature and are already building with it, not as a productivity trick, but as a core part of how you think about problems. You care about the product as much as the code. You’re drawn to work where the patterns don’t exist yet and the best answer requires you to invent it. If that’s how you already operate, we want to talk.

United Kingdom Base Pay Range

£76,500—£95,000 GBP

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

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