Practice Lead – Future Systems Engineering

Softwire; Manchester, Cambridge, Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 124,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension: 5%

25 days annual leave

Eye test

Cycle to work

EV lease scheme

Payroll charity donations

Job summary

Softwire is seeking a Practice Lead for Future Systems Engineering in the UK. The role combines technical leadership with commercial acumen to shape the service, drive market relevance, and enable delivery excellence.

You will guide offerings, pricing, and strategic direction while building a cadre of hands-on consultants to execute engagements. You will lead client conversations, shape bids, and mentor teams, balancing billable work with practice development across multiple offices, reporting

Qualifications

• 8+ years experience in technical roles, including at least 4 years in an agency or consultancy context.
• Designing and delivering systems at scale with non-functional requirements (performance, resilience, security, cost).
• Fluent in modern cloud architecture, including serverless and event-driven designs.
• Working understanding of how AI is changing engineering practice.
• Commercial fluency: business drivers, procurement, contracting models and margins.
• Comfortable in ambiguous contexts and distilling needs into practical solutions.
• Excellent consulting and advisory skills with peer-level conversations with executives.
• Pre-sales experience in an agency/consultancy context.

Responsibilities

• Articulate the Future Systems Engineering proposition for go-to-market teams.
• Discern technology shifts, regulatory changes and client demand signals for future planning.
• Enable new kinds of work with new offerings, approaches and commercial propositions.
• Strengthen capability by running the Systems Engineering Community of Practice and mentoring engineers.

Skills

Leadership

Consulting

Public speaking

Pre-sales

Cloud architecture

AI in engineering

Job description

Practice Lead - Future Systems Engineering

Practice Leads combine deep engineering judgement with commercial instinct, and use both to shape where Softwire's Future Systems Engineering service goes next.

Location: Manchester, Cambridge, London

About Softwire

Softwire is a leading UK technology and strategy consultancy. From enterprise to government, we help visionary organisations turn strategic ambitions into results at scale. Our practices cover AI transformation, data platforms, systems engineering, advanced CX and experience design.

Softwire was founded on one simple idea: be the outstanding place to work for smart, passionate technologists who want to make an impact. Attract the best, create a culture where people thrive, and offer our customers access to capabilities that are truly market-leading.

And it seems to be working - We were recently voted number 1 company to work for in the UK at the Best Company awards; we employ outstanding people across all capabilities (typical destinations after Softwire include Google, DeepMind, start-up founder, algorithmic trading, and AI research roles); and we have helped our clients deliver some of the hardest, most interesting tech programmes, across private and public sectors.

A big part of this is our culture and values, and we are looking for people who share our core beliefs about what makes a great place to work:

• That if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly
• That work should be fulfilling but can also be fun
• That kindness matters and should be extended to employees and clients alike
• That by being trusting and trustworthy as an organisation and as individuals, we can dispense with tedious bureaucracy and rules

The role

Future Systems Engineering is one of Softwire's four services, alongside AI Transformation, Data Strategy & Platforms, and Digital Product & Customer Experience. It covers technical strategy and architecture, legacy modernisation, cloud platform engineering, security architecture and resilience, and cost management, largely for regulated industries and critical national infrastructure.

Internally, we call our services Practices, which is where this role title comes from.

The Practice Lead owns and develops that service. You will make sure what we offer clients remains relevant three years from now, and that our engineers can deliver it. The work falls into four parts:

• Articulate our service. Support the go-to-market teams selling Future Systems Engineering into our sectors: energy and utilities, financial services, government, insurance.
• Discern what is coming next. Track technology shifts, vendor moves, regulatory change and client demand signals, and form a view on what they mean for us.
• Enable new kinds of work. Develop the approaches, offerings and commercial propositions that let us take on engagements we have not run before.
• Strengthen our capability. Run the systems engineering Community of Practice, spread good ideas between accounts, and raise the technical bar across the company.

You will split your time roughly evenly between billable client work and practice development, managing that balance yourself. The client work sits mostly at the front of engagements: early conversations, discovery, architecture reviews, workshops and diagnostics, then enabling and supporting the delivery teams who run the resulting programmes.

Practice Leads work as a team, one per service, and report to the CTO. They sit in an office of the CTO alongside our two heads of capability and Vendor Relations. You will also build a pod of three to five hands-on mid-level and senior technical consultants who move quickly into tactical engagements, take new practice ideas forward, and support your work more widely. Beyond that pod, your influence rests on credibility with engineers and with client executives, so you will need to stay close enough to the technology to hold both conversations properly.

You will be responsible for

Practice development, around half your time:

• Owning the Future Systems Engineering proposition: what we sell, how we describe it, how we price it, and how it changes over time.
• Deciding what we should be able to do in three years that we cannot do today, and building the offerings, approaches and skills that get us there.
• Leading Softwire's thought leadership on systems engineering: writing, speaking at events, taking part in industry forums, and directing a pipeline of content produced by colleagues.
• Coordinating the systems engineering Community of Practice, and developing the skills and standards of engineers across our accounts.
• Building and directing a small pod of hands-on technical consultants who take practice ideas from proposition through to first delivery.

Client work and go-to-market, around half your time:

• Leading the technical shaping of bids and pitches that call on Future Systems Engineering: running early-stage client conversations alongside Client Directors, setting the solution direction, and writing the technical sections of proposals.
• Running discovery engagements yourself: workshops, technical assessments, architecture and modernisation strategies, written recommendations for client boards.
• Setting up major engagements for success, making sure the delivery team understands the client's need and the context behind it, then supporting them through the work.
• Building strong relationships with senior client stakeholders, and using them to find further areas where we can add value.
• Mentoring and coaching colleagues in both technical and consultancy skills.

About you

You’ll be well described by many of the following:

• You have 8+ years experience in technical roles, including at least 4 years in an agency or consultancy context. You understand how consultancies win, price, and scope work.
• You have designed and delivered systems at scale in demanding environments, and you can speak with authority about non-functional requirements: performance, resilience, security, cost.
• You are fluent in modern cloud architecture, including serverless and event-driven designs, and you can explain to a sceptical client where those approaches pay off and where they do not.
• You have a working understanding of how AI is changing engineering practice and platform requirements, and an interest in developing it further.
• You are commercially fluent. You think about business drivers, procurement, contracting models and margin, and you can connect an engineering decision to its commercial consequence.
• You are comfortable in ambiguous contexts, deciding on incomplete information across competing stakeholder agendas, and distilling disparate needs into clear, practical solutions with broad buy-in.
• You follow the market closely: vendor strategies, pricing shifts, regulatory change, emerging techniques, and what clients are starting to ask for. You can turn scattered signals into a clear position on what we should do about it.
• You have excellent consulting and advisory skills. You hold peer-level conversations with C-suite executives about business strategy and tell them something they did not already know. You present comfortably, write well, and can build a compelling message.
• You have pre-sales experience in an agency or consultancy context, and you want more of it. Client Directors own the commercial relationship; you enjoy shaping the opportunity with them and showing prospective clients we are a good fit.
• You have built, or want to build, a public profile in systems engineering: writing for a trade publication, speaking at a conference, contributing to a standards body, or sitting on a working group. It makes up a good part of the role.
• You are a leader: you understand how to inspire people to follow you and to create the conditions for success across teams you have no formal authority over.
• You are collaborative, and your default approach is to work as a team, openly sharing information, resources and comms. You see all other colleagues as allies, and you are comfortable in a culture which values and rewards collective success over personal attribution.
• You take a can-do approach and don't mind getting your hands dirty and leaning into issues and opportunities that you identify. You don't need a perfect environment to thrive, and you are comfortable taking ownership of situations and problems with a positive approach to addressing them.

What we offer

Softwire operates transparent pay scales and a profit share scheme based on role and overall company performance.

• Base salary based on experience, ranging from £110,400 to £124,200
• Average profit share of between £19,000 and £25,250, depending on your experience and company performance.
• Pension: an additional 5% of salary.
• 25 days annual leave, with the option to buy and sell.
• Time off for company-wide morale events, and time off for charitable activities.
• Free annual eye test, income protection, cycle to work, electric vehicle lease schemes, and payroll charity donations.

Flexibility:

We are a flexible employer who understands that being committed to a job is not the same as sacrificing everything for it: holiday is holiday; if you need flexibility for life stuff, that's not a problem; and we don't expect (or want) long hours. We believe in a good work/life balance.