Software Engineering Manager

PureGym; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free gym membership for you +1

Flexible working culture

Life insurance x4

Pension contribution

25 days annual leave +1 personal day

Option to purchase additional holiday

Learning & development resources

Enhanced parental pay and leave

Job summary

PureGym is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead, develop, and grow a group of software engineers across multiple delivery squads. You will drive growth, ensure high-quality delivery, and partner with engineering leadership to move the business forward.

The role is remote with quarterly meetings in the London office, offering a comprehensive benefits package and opportunities for professional development in a fast-paced, AI-driven environment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading software engineers and running 1:1s, performance conversations and progression.
• Technical credibility with strong engineering background to discuss quality, standards and growth.
• Ability to coach and provide clear development plans that move people forward.
• Good judgment on when to intervene in a squad and drive root cause resolution.
• Upstream technical work: pre-delivery workshops and shaping delivery missions.

Responsibilities

• Provide line management for engineers across multiple squads and conduct regular 1:1s and performance reviews.
• Grow engineers through a defined development framework and support promotions.
• Set development goals aligned with overall calibration and business outcomes.
• Embed engineering standards and AI-first practices at the individual level, ensuring adherence to coding practices and NF requirements.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration with delivery managers and business analysts.
• Balance time across leadership, upstream technical partnership, technical contribution, embedded delivery and hygiene.

Skills

People leadership

Technical credibility

Coaching

Upstream technical work

Matrixed teams

AI tooling

.NET/Azure

Tools

Azure

Kafka

Postgres

Kubernetes

GraphQL

GitHub workflows

Job description

The PureGym Group is a global gym business with a community of more than 700 gyms and over 2 million members. At PureGym, everything we do comes back to one simple idea: helping you feel good.

We're proud of our people and have a strong focus on internal progression. Championing diversity, we are committed to providing an excellent employee experience and workplace culture. As such, we are a Disability Confident Committed employer, and offer interviews to candidates who meet the essential criteria for a role, and opt-in to the scheme on their application form.

Our gyms are friendly, supportive, and judgement-free spaces where everybody can come in, work out and leave Feeling PureGym Good. We are proud to be certified by Top Employers Institute. See our careers page for full benefits.

We offer

• Free nationwide gym membership for you + 1
• A truly flexible working culture
• Life insurance x4
• Company pension contribution
• 25 days annual leave, plus 1 personal day
• Option to purchase additional holiday (up to 5 days)
• Great learning & development resources
• Enhanced maternity pay, paternity and adoption leave

The Role

Location: Remote

Type: Full Time

Contract type: Permanent

Application: 31st October 2026

We are looking for a Software Engineering Manager to join our Team! The role will lead, develop, and grow a group of software engineers matrixed across PureGym’s delivery squads, ensuring they are motivated, progressing, and consistently delivering business outcomes at pace.

Performance in this role means both: engineers who are growing in their craft and engineers who are shipping working features that move the dial for the business and retain quality. You’ll operate as the connective tissue between the individuals in the squads and the wider engineering function, holding the bar on standards, capability, and output across the teams you support.

This is a remote role, with quarterly meetings in our London Office.

PureGym’s digital platforms power millions of member interactions and are evolving at pace. As a Software Engineering Manager, you’ll be the dedicated people manager for a group of engineers embedded across multiple delivery squads, accountable for their growth, performance, and development, andequally accountable for ensuring they’re delivering quality outcomes, moving at pace, and creating real business value.

You’ll work in close partnership with the Head of Software Engineering and your fellow SEMs

Roughly, you can expect your time to split across five areas, though the balance will flex with the quarter:

• ~25% people leadership: 1:1s, development conversations, performance management, calibration, and hiring
• ~30% upstream technical partnership: acting as one of the three leads in the initiative lifecycle alongside the Delivery Manager and Business Analyst, owning the Discovery phase for initiatives, and leading or contributing to the initiative acceptance so squads can take it on and execute with confidence
• ~15% technical contribution: reactive support when squads need it, PR reviews, and tech debt work where you can add most value
• ~15% embedded delivery: one sprint equivalent per quarter contributing as an engineer in a squad, rotating each quarter
• ~15% engineering leadership and hygiene: big room planning, cross-functional work, NFR oversight, compliance and access governance, and operational cost management

You’ll be responsible for:

• Providing dedicated line management for a group of engineers across multiple delivery squads, including regular 1:1s, performance conversations, and ongoing pastoral support, ensuring they are performing, delivering quality work, and progressing in their careers
• Owning the growth and progression of your engineers through the engineering growth framework, setting clear development goals, tracking progress, and supporting promotion cases
• Conducting performance reviews and objective-setting for your engineers in alignment with the Head of Software Engineering and the wider calibration process, with goals that connect individual contribution to real business outcomes
• Embedding engineering standards and AI-first ways of working at the individual level, ensuring your engineers understand and apply our coding practices, non-functional requirements, and engineering principles in their day-to-day work

The Person

You’re a people-first engineering leader who understands that great software is built by great people, and that great people need the right support, the right challenge, and someone genuinely invested in their development.

The ideal candidate would have started as an engineer, and you’ve kept enough technical currency that the people you manage trust your instincts. But you’ve made the shift: your energy now comes from the growth and output of your engineers, not the elegance of your own code.

You’re excited about what AI means for engineering and you know how to bring people on that journey: the enthusiasts, the sceptics, and everyone in between.

Qualifications & Skills

Our teams build and run PureGym’s digital estate using a modern, event-driven technology landscape. At its core is a service-oriented .NET architecture, with services communicating through Kafka, backed by Postgres and exposed through a federated GraphQL layer. Everything runs in containers on Kubernetes in Azure, shipped through GitHub workflows and monitored with Grafana. On top of that sit a fast Astro-powered website, a .NET MAUI native app and Payload as our headless CMS, alongside integrations with Braze, our member management system (MMS) and our strategic payment partners. We look after secure authentication flows for our members, treat internationalisation as a first-class concern across our markets, and work in an agile, Kanban-style flow. It’s a genuinely exciting stack, built for pace, scale, and quality.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has direct experience managing software engineers in a line management capacity: running 1:1s, owning performance conversations, and supporting progression
• Is technically credible: has a strong engineering background and can engage meaningfully with engineers on quality, standards, and growth, ideally at Technical Lead level or above
• Is a confident coach: able to give clear, direct, honest feedback and create development plans that actually move people forward
• Has good judgment about when to intervene in a squad and when to hold back, and can retrospect clearly on incidents and blockers to drive root cause resolution
• Is effective at upstream technical work: comfortable in pre-delivery workshops, shaping delivery missions, and partnering with the Principal Software Engineer to ensure work is well-formed before it hits the squads
• Experience working in a matrixed or self-organising engineering team structure
• Background in a direct-to-consumer digital business (app, website, or e-commerce)
• Experience supporting engineers through significant structural or cultural change
• Hands‑on experience with AI coding tools and agentic engineering workflows
• Familiarity with .NET, Azure, or event-driven microservice architectures

PureGym is proud to be an equal opportunities employer. Our company mantra is ‘Everybody Welcome’ and we are dedicated to promoting a diverse and inclusive place to work. From a hiring standpoint, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to ensuring that our PureGym colleagues reflect the diversity of the nation as well as our millions of gym members we serve.

Please note: Qualifications and Skills represent the essential criteria for the role, which need to be met to be offered an interview under the Disability Confident Scheme. Volume of eligible applications may impact everyone being able to be offered an interview.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and the advert may be withdrawn at any time.