Lead Software Engineer

Redgate Software; Cambridge; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Comprehensive health coverage

Monthly wellbeing allowance

Flexible working arrangements

Generous paid time off

Employee assistance program

Community and social events

Job summary

Redgate Software is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to mentor a cross-functional team delivering the next generation of AI features for database tooling. You will own architectural quality, guide complex projects, and raise engineering standards across the product line.

You will work closely with an Architect and Group Engineering Manager to shape technical direction while supporting the growth of engineers and driving customer-focused outcomes.

Qualifications

• Experience leading complex engineering initiatives and teams.
• Ability to design scalable and secure systems with trade-offs.
• Excellent communication to distill complex decisions.

Responsibilities

• Translate business strategy into technical implementation with your team.
• Lead and mentor engineers to raise engineering practices.
• Own quality of software design and drive architectural decisions.
• Write maintainable, high-quality code and lead cross-team initiatives.
• Collaborate with architects to set technical strategy.
• Support coaching and growth of team members.

Skills

Main languages: .NET/C#

Python

TypeScript

AI tooling awareness

Tools

Cursor

VSCode agents

Claude code

Codex

Job description

Redgate creates simple software to help data professionals get the most value out of any database. Our solutions solve complex database management challenges across the DevOps lifecycle, making life easier for IT leaders, development, and operations teams by increasing efficiency, reducing errors, and protecting business-critical data. The data community trusts Redgate to balance speed to market, team collaboration, and data protection.

Find out more about us here:

• Redgate Software – Culture
• RepVue

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll be part of a small, cross-functional team that typically includes a Tech Lead, Lead Software Engineer, Product Designer, Product Manager, and 4–5 software engineers. Beyond your immediate team, you'll benefit from the support of the Group Engineering Manager who oversees delivery, people, and processes across the group, an Architect who provides technical direction at the product level, and a coaching function to help you get unblocked.

This Lead Software Engineer role is for a team working on building the next generation of AI capabilities particularly targeted towards database administration.

This involves both developing new interfaces and approaches that address the needs of database professionals in using agentic AI, and working with other teams across Redgate to bring capabilities from their tools into the workflow.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will be hands-on, shaping the approach the team takes to solving the most complex engineering tasks. You will be responsible for the quality of engineering practices within the team and developing the skills of team members to support this. You will lead cross-team engineering initiatives and work with your architect to inform technical strategy.

Beyond pure technical skills, a key part of the Lead Software Engineer role is the elevation of the whole team. This includes mentoring, coaching, teaching and sharing your expertise. You will collaborate closely with the rest of the team’s leadership to help set and enact the team’s goals.

Your work at Redgate

• Work closely with the Tech Lead and wider team to translate business strategy into implementation.
• Be accountable for the quality of software design for the product team in which you are assigned, balancing technical debt against speed of delivery.
• Share technical decisions within the solution group, division and team.
• Lead significant pieces of work including clarifying requirements, facilitating meetings, breaking tasks down and checking-in with other team members.
• Write and maintain high quality software.
• Grow the skills of other software engineers to take engineering to the next level.
• Establish strong engineering practice and work to deliver the technical strategy.
• Regularly contribute to internal Level Up events to support growing and developing skills within the division.
• Work with the group architect to help inform technical strategy.
• Understanding how the product or systems owned by your team solve customer problems and add value, prioritising engineering work based on its potential to provide value to customers.

Who you are

• You have exposure in modern .NET/ C#, Python and Typescript with expertise in at least one.
• You can design and build world-class scalable, resilient, and secure systems, considering trade-offs and future implications.
• You have a bias for simplicity and maintainability in the code you write and the products you build.
• You have evidence of leading complex pieces of work, including leading the collaboration with other teams.
• You are an excellent communicator, being able to distil complex technical decisions into clear rationale.
• You're enthusiastic about engaging with customers as necessary to create a great product.
• You are driven by continuous improvement and foster a growth mindset within the team. You have evidence of supporting the professional development of other engineers through coaching, mentoring and role modelling.

We are looking for people with skills matching the team's focus on LLM-based AI. Experience in some or all of the following areas would be an advantage:

• Cloud infrastructure (especially AWS), infrastructure as code, and service management
• Experience building AI applications/features and iterating based on user feedback.
• Agentic coding best practises:
• Implementing supporting knowledge bases, e.g. opening access to searchable third-party codebases.
• Experience with different AI coding tools e.g. Cursor, VSCode agents, Claude code, Codex etc.
• MCP:
• Experience developing servers and clients
• Experience consuming existing servers and clients e.g. Claude desktop, cursor, etc.
• AI feedback loops, agent observability and evaluation
• Experience with semantic search and vector databases
• Front-end development with Typescript, React and/or Material UI

At Redgate, we believe supporting and empowering our people is key to our success. We create an environment where you can thrive in your career and enjoy every moment of your journey with us.

Benefits include:

• competitive salary
• comprehensive health coverage
• monthly wellbeing allowance
• flexible working arrangements
• generous paid time off
• employee assistance program
• community and social events

Find out more on our benefits page, or see what our employees said on our Flexa page!

Redgate has adopted a flexible-hybrid model. This means that people will work flexibly with a blend of remote (home) and co-located (office) work, with teams having the flexibility to decide which location best suits the outcomes they need to deliver.