Engineering Manager: Lead, Mentor & Scale Tech Teams

Champion Data; Leeds; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mindful Me Days

Flexible Working

UK Office

Wellness Incentive

Get to the Game

L&D Budget

LinkedIn Learning

Social Events

Job summary

Champion Data is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager in the UK to lead and develop a high-performing group of engineers. You will provide strong technical direction, drive architectural consistency and balance delivery with long-term platform strategy.

You will operate across multiple client engagements, mentor engineers, and contribute to solution design and reviews while fostering a culture of excellence, innovation and psychological safety in a hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience directly leading, coaching and developing engineers.
• Strong track record of building effective, high-performing engineering teams.
• Deep understanding of modern software engineering, cloud platforms, distributed systems and scalable architectural patterns.
• Experience designing, reviewing and guiding complex technical solutions.

Responsibilities

• Provide direct people leadership for an allocated group of engineers.
• Run regular 1:1s and lead performance, development and career conversations.
• Set clear expectations and provide timely, constructive feedback.
• Identify individual strengths, development needs and progression opportunities.
• Address performance or behavioural concerns early and constructively.
• Build trust, engagement, accountability and psychological safety across the team.
• Support recruitment, onboarding and retention of high-quality engineering talent.
• Provide strong technical leadership across the teams, products and client engagements they support.
• Reinforce the architecture, engineering standards, practices and technical direction established by the Head of Engineering.
• Participate in solution design, architecture discussions, technical reviews and major engineering decisions.
• Challenge technical approaches where better solutions exist and encourage thoughtful innovation.
• Identify technical risk, quality concerns and capability gaps early and ensure they are addressed.
• Ensure engineering decisions balance immediate delivery needs with maintainability, scalability and long-term platform strategy.
• Model and reinforce a culture of engineering excellence, accountability, curiosity and continuous improvement.
• Actively champion modern engineering practices, automation and AI-enabled ways of working.
• Encourage teams to challenge existing approaches and continually improve how software is designed, developed and delivered.
• Share learning and effective practices across teams rather than allowing capability to remain isolated within individual projects.
• Act as a visible and positive technical leader within the regional engineering community.
• Maintain sufficient proximity to client and product delivery to understand priorities, technical challenges and emerging risks.
• Work closely with Delivery, Product and Engineering leadership to ensure teams have clear technical direction and are capable of meeting their commitments.
• Represent Champion Data credibly in technical client conversations where required.
• Escalate material technical, capability, people or delivery risks early.
• Ensure client delivery pressures do not undermine sustainable engineering practices or team wellbeing.
• Maintain strong contemporary engineering capability and remain sufficiently hands-on to provide credible technical leadership.
• Contribute directly where it materially improves an outcome, unblocks a team, validates an approach or demonstrates a pattern.
• Participate in code and design reviews with an emphasis on quality, coaching and capability development.
• Avoid becoming the default owner of complex engineering work; enable and develop engineers to own and deliver that work.
• Measure technical contribution through team capability and engineering outcomes rather than individual coding volume.
• Operate as part of the regional Technology leadership structure and contribute to broader organisational decisions.
• Provide the CTO and Heads of Technology with visibility of team health, capability, performance and emerging risks.
• Support workforce and capability planning as the regional engineering organisation grows.
• Build strong relationships across Technology and the wider Champion Data business.
• Take ownership of organisational responsibilities beyond individual client or project boundaries where required.

Skills

Engineering leadership

People management

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

Technical reviews

Architecture

Tools

AWS

Job description

Champion Data is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager in the UK to lead and develop a high-performing group of engineers. You will provide strong technical direction, drive architectural consistency and balance delivery with long-term platform strategy.

You will operate across multiple client engagements, mentor engineers, and contribute to solution design and reviews while fostering a culture of excellence, innovation and psychological safety in a hybrid work environment.