Engineering Lead

Link Financial Outsourcing Limited; Cardiff; Hybrid; GBP 68,000 - 83,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid/flexible working

Job summary

Link Financial Outsourcing Limited is seeking a senior engineer to lead a 4-person team while staying hands-on about 90% of the time. You will drive delivery of financial software for partners and clients, while mentoring engineers and guiding architectural decisions.

The role is based in Cardiff with hybrid/flexible working and a salary up to £75k, plus a bonus up to £15k, reflecting experience and impact. You will collaborate with customers and stakeholders to achieve real results.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of how good software gets built with hands-on Java/Spring Boot.
• Proven track record delivering software projects and managing dependencies/ trade-offs.
• Experience managing stakeholders and communicating delivery status to non-technical audiences.
• Line management or demonstrated mentoring with readiness for formal leadership.
• Genuine interest in progressing engineers' careers and coaching.
• Comfortable using data/metrics to report progress and identify issues.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership and Development: stay hands-on, set direction, guide design, promote quality.
• Delivery and Execution: plan and track delivery, manage risks, break work into increments.
• People and Development: mentor engineers, run one-to-ones, support progression.
• AI and Innovation: encourage safe AI usage to improve speed and outcomes.
• Stakeholder and Communication: clearly communicate decisions and status to product and customers.

Skills

Java/Spring Boot

Technical leadership

Hands-on development

Delivery planning

Stakeholder management

Line management

AI interest

Tools

Jenkins

Grafana

Prometheus

React/TypeScript

Job description

Location: Cardiff

Hybrid/Flexible Working

Salary: Up to £75k depending on experience, plus a potential bonus up to £15k

The Role

Are you a senior engineer looking for your next step? Do you want to stay hands-on while you start building your leadership skills?

AI is changing the way we build software. Our teams are smaller, our output is higher and the pace is faster. We're looking for developers who are ready for that next step. You'll spend around 90% of your time on hands-on development. The rest of your time goes on leading a team of 4 engineers, driving delivery, and working with customers and stakeholders to get real results.

You'll join the Engineering Team at LDMS, reporting to Engineering Management and building financial software for our partners and clients.

Key Responsibilities:

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Technical Leadership and Development:

• Stay hands-on, writing, reviewing and shipping production code alongside your team
• Set clear technical direction for your team, keeping decisions aligned to team and product goals
• Guide design and technical decisions and support a review culture that raises quality and teaches, rather than just approves
• Spot technical debt early and work closely with your senior engineers to make sure engineering standards are adopted across the team

Delivery and Execution:

• Plan and track delivery for your team, raising risks and scope changes early
• Break complex work into deliverable increments with clear dependencies and acceptance criteria
• Run delivery sessions and workshops, such as whiteboarding an area, to shape and unblock work
• Keep an eye on dependencies with other teams, and flag them early
• Make sensible trade-offs on scope, quality and pace under pressure, and keep delivery moving
• Balance the team's time between product features and technical debt
• Keep the team's ways of working lean and adaptable, using process and meetings where they genuinely help rather than running them by default

People and Development:

• Mentor and coach your engineers through guidance, review and honest career conversations
• Run regular, structured one-to-ones focused on growth, wellbeing and clearing blockers
• Give direct, evidence-based feedback and support each person's development and progression
• Interview and hire strong engineers into your team
• Build a strong team culture with high standards and psychological safety

AI and Innovation:

• Encourage the team to use AI where it clearly helps them work faster or produce better software, and to be honest about where it doesn't
• Make sensible use of AI and automation part of how the team works day to day, rather than something tried once and dropped
• Use simple measures of how the team is doing to spot progress and catch work that’s slipping or running over

Stakeholder and Communication:

• Communicate your team's technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to product and non-technical colleagues
• Manage stakeholder expectations proactively, so status updates contain no surprises
• Escalate issues to Engineering Management at the right time and in the right way, with options rather than problems
• Communicate release content to customers and support their delivery questions, giving confidence in what's coming and when

Requirements

Essential:

• A strong understanding of how good software gets built (preferably hands-on in Java/Spring Boot), with the technical judgement to guide design decisions, PR reviews and assess quality across your team
• A proven track record of planning, tracking and delivering software projects, including managing dependencies and trade-offs
• Experience managing stakeholders and communicating delivery status, risks and trade-offs clearly to non-technical and customer-facing audiences, in writing and in person
• Line management experience, or a strong track record of coaching and mentoring with the readiness to take on formal line management
• A genuine interest in progressing engineers' careers
• Comfortable using data and metrics to report progress and identify problems early

Desirable:

• An interest in using AI to help teams build software
• Experience within the financial sector
• Experience in front end development (preferably in React/TypeScript)
• Experience working with modern Continuous Integration tooling, such as Jenkins
• Experience debugging and troubleshooting issues using monitoring and observability tooling, such as Grafana, Prometheus or equivalent