Engineering Team Lead

Link Financial Outsourcing Limited; Cardiff; On-site; GBP 45,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

LDMS is seeking an Engineering Leader to join the Engineering Team, reporting to Engineering Management and leading around 6–8 engineers across two teams that build financial software for partners and clients.

This is a leadership role focused on delivering team output and developing people, with coaching, unblocking and setting direction while staying close enough to technical work to guide design decisions and uphold review quality.

Qualifications

• Experience leading 6–8 engineers across multiple teams.
• Strong engineering background with a focus on growing engineers.
• Ability to coach, unblock and set direction while guiding design decisions.
• Experience with reviews and maintaining engineering standards.

Responsibilities

• Set clear technical direction aligned to team and product goals.
• Guide design decisions and support a review culture that raises quality.
• Spot technical debt and ensure standards are adopted across teams.
• Plan and track delivery, raise risks early, manage scope changes.
• Break work into deliverable increments with clear dependencies.
• Run delivery sessions and workshops to unblock work.
• Balance feature work with technical debt and keep processes lean.
• Mentor engineers through growth conversations and career development.
• Encourage responsible use of AI to improve speed and quality.
• Communicate decisions and trade-offs clearly to product and stakeholders.

Skills

Technical leadership

Delivery management

Mentoring

People leadership

Stakeholder communication

AI adoption

Job description

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

The Role

You'll join the Engineering Team at LDMS, reporting to Engineering Management and leading around 6-8 engineers organised into two teams that build financial software for our partners and clients.

This is a leadership role for someone with a strong engineering background who is passionate about growing engineers. Your two main focuses are your teams' delivery output and the development of the people in them. You'll spend most of your time coaching, unblocking and setting direction, staying close enough to the technical work to guide design decisions and support the team through reviews. That technical grounding is what makes you effective.

Key Responsibilities:

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

Technical Leadership:

• Set clear technical direction for your teams, 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 lead/senior engineers to ensure engineering standards are adopted across both teams

Delivery and Execution:

• Plan and track delivery across both teams, raising risks and scope changes early
• Break complex work into deliverable increments with clear dependencies and acceptable criteria
• Run delivery sessions and workshops, such as whiteboarding an area, to shape and unblock work
• Keep an eye on dependencies between your teams and 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 teams
• 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 teams' 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