Lead Software Engineer

Bauer Media Group; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Bauer Media Group seeks a Lead Engineer for its Manchester hub to lead a small software squad delivering critical business solutions. The role combines hands-on coding with people leadership, guiding architecture, and ensuring high standards in a DevOps culture.

You will work with Product and Tech leaders to align engineering with strategic priorities, while fostering an inclusive, collaborative environment and delivering initiatives across Europe.

Qualifications

• Experience leading software engineering squads in a product-driven environment.
• Ability to guide technical direction and software architecture while delivering value.

Responsibilities

• Grow and coach the squad, conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and growth plans.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers to build confidence and skills.
• Write and review production-grade code, guiding quality and maintainability.
• Drive architectural decisions and technical direction within the squad and broader org.
• Plan squad capacity, forecast hiring needs, and manage delivery commitments.
• Define coding standards, review processes, and manage technical debt.
• Participate in incident management rotas and support the DevOps culture.

Skills

Team leadership

Mentoring

Agile delivery

Cross-functional collaboration

Stakeholder management

Tools

Java Spring Boot

AWS

Kubernetes

Kafka

TypeScript/React

Job description

Our Team: How We Enrich Everyday Life

You'll be joining Bauer Media Audio (BMA), Europe's biggest commercial audio broadcaster, connecting audiences across nine markets to the music, stories and experiences they love. Bauer Media Audio is making a significant investment in a new in-house software engineering hub in Manchester. This new hub reinforces Manchester’s position as a key technology centre for Bauer Media Audio, alongside its existing locations. We're creating a new engineering team to build innovative business-critical solutions that will power Bauer Media’s audio platform of the future. Our team is built around squads, each aligned to a distinct value stream, with a layer of cross-squad roles – people whose expertise and support spans the whole team. Each squad will be led by a Product Manager and Lead Engineer, working in partnership and jointly accountable for their squad's work and outcomes. Squads are intentionally small – typically around five to six engineers – keeping them focused, collaborative, and able to move quickly. Our team thrives on collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to delivering high-quality, scalable solutions, working closely with product and technology peers to ensure our platforms meet the evolving needs of the business and our international markets.

The Difference You Will Make

As Lead Engineer, you will combine hands-on technical contribution with the day-to-day leadership and people management of a software engineering squad within our new engineering team. You will work alongside your team, writing and reviewing code, guiding technical decisions, maintaining engineering standards, supporting the growth of individual engineers, and acting as the connective tissue between your squad and the broader engineering organisation. You'll work closely with the Director of Engineering and leaders from adjacent disciplines to ensure your team’s work aligns with our technical direction and product priorities.

You’ll lead with empathy and clarity to foster a culture of continuous improvement, shared ownership, and engineering excellence within your squad. Team leadership roles are vital to our success so you will play a key role in helping to create a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment that is psychologically safe, where everyone can be their authentic selves and do their best work, every day.

Your Role

Grow your team

Support your engineers’ career development and build a motivated, high-performing squad through regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and by creating individual growth plans.

Mentor junior and mid-level engineers – fostering a continuous improvement culture and helping the team build technical confidence and skills.

Contribute technically

Write and review code as an active contributor to your squad’s delivery – guiding by example on quality, maintainability, and best practice.

Guide architectural decisions and technical direction within your squad and contribute to broader engineering discussions.

Drive delivery and planning

Plan and manage squad capacity across projects – forecast hiring needs and allocating resources effectively to meet delivery commitments.

Participate in roadmap, refinement, and sprint planning sessions – working closely with Product colleagues and adjacent discipline leads, providing technical input, ensuring clear scoping, and surfacing dependencies and risks early.

Uphold engineering standards

Define and sustain coding standards and review processes – conducting code reviews focused on quality, maintainability, and consistency.

Track and manage technical debt within your squad – balancing debt reduction with feature delivery and escalating systemic issues where needed.

Ensure operational excellence

Participate in the in-hours and out-of-hours incident management rotas, providing hands-on technical support and clear, calm communication during high-pressure situations.

Advocate for the 'you build it, you run it' ethos – ensuring your squad is equipped to deploy, operate, and support the systems they build as part of a DevOps culture where second line out of hours support is the expectation.

What We're Looking For

Experience of some but not necessarily all of the following:

Technical capability

• Solid hands-on software engineering experience, with sufficient depth across frontend and backend development to guide technical decisions, review code meaningfully, and set the standard for your squad.
• Able to lead a team across our core stack – a Java Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes and Kafka back end, with a TypeScript/React front end – deep expertise in some areas, with the breadth to engage credibly across the rest.
• A strong grasp of software architecture principles – domain-driven design, service boundaries, and event-driven communication (e.g. via Kafka) – and the ability to guide your squad's technical direction within a broader engineering strategy.
• Modern engineering practices: CI/CD, containerisation, version control workflows, code review, testing strategies, and observability.
• Security best practices embedded across the development lifecycle, with the ability to guide your squad to do the same.
• An awareness of AI trends within engineering and an interest in AI-assisted development tooling – understanding how these tools can improve your squad's productivity and code quality.

Leadership and people skills

• Leading or mentoring with a servant-leadership mindset and a genuine focus on the growth and wellbeing of your colleagues.
• Communicating with a range of people and organisational roles, managing stakeholder expectations, representing your team’s needs, and fostering collaboration across multidisciplinary teams.
• Acting as an escalation point for your team, supporting them through complex or time-sensitive situations.
• Taking an organised and structured approach to planning, managing priorities and keeping delivery on track.

Industry and delivery experience

• Leading a software engineering team or squad in a product-led, multidisciplinary organisation, with a track record of consistent, quality delivery.
• Agile software delivery practices and methodologies – with the experience to implement the right approach for your squad's context; SCRUM experience is a plus.
• Adapting to evolving business priorities, communicating calmly and clearly when under pressure.
• Media, audio streaming, or consumer platform experience is a plus.

Working Pattern and Location

This is a permanent, hybrid, full-time role with an in-office presence twice a week in our Manchester hub. Like all roles in the team, this one includes participation in incident management rotas – we schedule these collaboratively, taking into account everyone's responsibilities and commitments outside of work.

Why Join Us?

The chance to lead a team building platforms that reach millions of listeners across Europe, with real impact on the products people use every day.

A growing engineering organisation investing heavily in its people, practices, and technology – with genuine support for leadership development.

A collaborative, product-led environment where engineering has a clear and respected voice in shaping business outcomes.

An environment that values empathy, accountability, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.

About Bauer Media Group

We are a media business focused on creating content that matters to millions of people across Europe. Our offering extends from print and online publishing to audio broadcasting and entertainment, alongside investments in other media related sectors. With more than 500 million copies sold each year, we are one of Europe’s largest Publishers. From women's and celebrities’ magazines to TV listings to food and special interest, we own some of the most popular publishing brands in Germany, UK, Poland and France – both digital and print. But not only that. Reaching over 61 million listeners weekly, we operate over 150 radio and podcast brands in nine countries, spanning the UK, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Portugal. Family-owned in the 5th generation, Bauer Media focuses on the