Lead Optimization Software Engineer

easyJet; Luton; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Annual bonus

Staff travel discounts

Pension scheme

Flexible benefits package

Work Away abroad 30 days/year

Electric vehicle lease

Job summary

easyJet is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for Optimization Engineering to lead an cross‑functional team building decision‑support software for disruption management and crew planning. You will translate operational problems into scalable software and optimisation models, guiding architecture, delivery, and reliability.

The role blends people leadership with hands‑on technical direction across services, data pipelines, and solver integration. Strong communication with stakeholders is essential.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading a software engineering team delivering production‑grade systems including solver technology (e.g., Gurobi/CPLEX).
• Strong fundamentals in system design, distributed systems, APIs, data modelling, testing and operational excellence.
• Experience building optimisation, scheduling or decision‑support applications with constraint‑based reasoning.
• Working knowledge of MILP, constraint programming and heuristics and how they affect product design.
• Hands‑on programming in one or more languages (Python, Java, C#, C++) with code‑review guidance.
• Experience integrating and operating optimisation components (solver orchestration, model/service boundaries, runtime config).
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non‑technical stakeholders and translate needs into deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow a cross‑functional team of software engineers and data science specialists.
• Own technical direction for models and services that model, optimise, and operationalise disruption and crewing solutions.
• Drive architecture decisions for services, data pipelines, and user workflows at scale.
• Partner with product management to shape roadmaps and define measurable outcomes.
• Collaborate with OR/optimisation experts to integrate solvers and ensure model performance and explainability.
• Establish engineering practices: code review, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, incident response.
• Build observability into optimisation services with KPIs, logs, and traces; manage latency and throughput.
• Contribute hands‑on when needed while enabling the team to deliver consistently.

Skills

People leadership

System design

Distributed systems

APIs

Data modelling

CI/CD

Communication

Python

Java

C++

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Gurobi

CPLEX

REST/gRPC

SQL

Docker

CI/CD tooling

Job description

easyJet is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for Optimization Engineering to lead an cross‑functional team building decision‑support software for disruption management and crew planning. You will translate operational problems into scalable software and optimisation models, guiding architecture, delivery, and reliability.

The role blends people leadership with hands‑on technical direction across services, data pipelines, and solver integration. Strong communication with stakeholders is essential.