Software Engineering Lead

Willis Towers Watson; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare

Life insurance

Group income protection

Hybrid working options

Employee assistance programme

Volunteer day

Electric vehicle car scheme

Share scheme

Cycle-to-work programme

Dental cover

Optical cover

Critical illness protection

Pension with company match

Job summary

Willis Towers Watson is seeking an Engineering Lead to shape and lead backend platforms and developer tooling. You’ll mentor a team of 5–7 engineers, drive shared infrastructure, and own production readiness across PHP, Go, and GraphQL services.

You will align technical decisions with delivery timelines, quality, and security, while partnering with product, security, and business teams to improve engineering practices and outcomes.

Qualifications

• Leadership and delivery experience in fintech/regulated environments.
• Strong ability to align technical decisions with business goals.
• Experience in building and leading multi-team engineering initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex, multi-team initiatives with clear dependencies and timelines.
• Define and drive technical strategy and engineering practices.
• Build partnerships across product, security, and business teams.
• Maintain focus on priorities while managing debt and reliability.
• Drive cross-team collaboration with fellow Engineering Leads.

Skills

Leadership

Backend Architecture

PHP

Go

GraphQL

API Design

Observability

Testing

CI/CD

Mentoring

Incident Response

Security

Performance

DX/Developer Experience

Tools

PHP

Go

GraphQL

Datadog

Yii

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Description

Ready to shape engineering at scale? As our Engineering Lead, you'll drive the platforms and tooling that help teams deliver faster, safer, and smarter.

Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances. Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. Learn more here - https://www.cushon.co.uk/about

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead to provide technical leadership for one of our teams. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations - the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

The Role

Technical Leadership

• Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers - balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability
• Guide API and domain design standards - clear service boundaries, consistent contracts, and pragmatic integration between modern services and legacy systems
• Shape event-driven and integration patterns so teams can build independently without breaking cross-squad journeys
• Champion automated testing, observability, and production readiness for backend services - PHPUnit, Go tests, Datadog, and safe release practices
• Oversee database and schema evolution practices - migrations, data integrity, and performance - in partnership with platform and infrastructure teams
• Lead incident response for backend-owned systems - triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality
• Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, Security, Performance and Optimisation - raising the bar through design review and hands-on contribution when needed
• Support production readiness for high-risk changes - coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross-team dependencies at the legacy/modern boundary

Delivery Leadership

• Lead delivery of complex, multi-team initiatives by managing dependencies, resources, and blockers
• Define and drive technical strategy, improving engineering practices and delivery processes
• Build strong partnerships across product, engineering, security, and business teams
• Keep teams focused on priorities while balancing technical debt and operational needs
• Drive collaboration across teams and lead cross-engineering initiatives with fellow Engineering Leads.

People & Developer experience

• Lead, coach, and mentor engineers to strengthen delivery and technical leadership
• Stay hands-on when needed, contributing to designs, code, and operational improvements
• Enhance developer experience through better tooling, documentation, and onboarding
• Support hiring and help raise the bar for engineering talent
• Empower teams to take ownership while providing guidance and direction where needed

Qualifications

What you’ll bring

Leadership & deliver"y

• Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines, reliability targets, and business needs
• Expertise in championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality, and operational stability
• Skill in reviewing and contributing to technical designs that meet quality and security standards
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels
• Capability to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership
• Strategic and tactical decision-making abilities
• Commitment to creating an empowering team environment that prioritises customer experience and engineering productivity

Technical experience

• Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast-growing, regulated environments (fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance)
• Deep expertise in at least one engineering discipline relevant to your squad - backend, frontend, mobile, quality, or platform operations - with solid breadth across design, build, test, and run
• Track record of owning production systems end-to-end: implementation, rollout, monitoring, incident response, and follow-up
• Experience leading technical delivery on complex, ambiguous initiatives involving multiple engineers, dependencies, or teams
• Strong architectural judgement - evaluating trade-offs, setting direction, and aligning others on pragmatic, maintainable solutions
• Expertise in automated testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices in high-stakes production environments
• Familiarity with observability and operational excellence - monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and blameless learning from incidents
• Understanding of security, compliance, and non-functional requirements in regulated financial services
• Comfortable working across modern and legacy systems - evolving the platform incrementally rather than through unnecessary rewrites
• Ability to stay hands-on - contributing to code, designs, and reviews when that is the fastest way to reduce risk or unblock the team

What we offer

Enjoy a benefits package designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally. You'll receive 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day to relax and recharge. Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind. Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company.

We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community. On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more. Start making the most of your career and wellbeing with a range of benefits tailored for you.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We’re committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants. If you foresee any barriers, from the application process through to joining WTW, please email [e-mail]