Software Engineering Lead

relx; Chennai District; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 4,000,000; Full time

Job summary

RELX is seeking a Software Engineering Lead in Chennai to drive cross-functional product and service delivery. You will be a hands-on engineering leader, deliver technical direction, and manage a team to ensure quality and reliable product outcomes.

You will partner with Product to align roadmaps, manage risks, and cultivate a high-performance engineering culture while upholding standards for security, compliance, and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineering leader with people management experience.
• Experience aligning product roadmaps with technical delivery.

Responsibilities

• Carry out management responsibilities in line with policies and laws.
• Build an inclusive, psychologically safe culture; resolve conflicts constructively.
• Provide effective line management to direct reports and act as escalation point.
• Conduct HR duties such as absence and performance management.
• Participate in hiring processes and onboarding for new team members.
• Coach and mentor engineers to meet performance goals and foster autonomy.

Skills

Engineering leadership

People management

Delivery ownership

Job description

Summary

The Software Engineering Lead is a hands‑on subject matter expert, engineering leader and people manager responsible for a cross-functional team delivering a defined set of products and services. This role combines technical leadership, delivery ownership, and people management .

The Lead sets technical direction, ensures technical and operational excellence, and partners with Product to deliver business outcomes. Through their direct team; ensures designs have effective architectural and structural oversight, reliable products are delivered. As a peer to a Principal Software Engineer, this role is accountable for engineering outcomes (quality, reliability, security, compliance, cost, and speed) and for cultivating a high‑performance, inclusive engineering culture. Analyses and aligns product roadmaps and determines the technical feasibility of future development projects. In addition will provide direction into delivery plans, schedules, raises risks and updated roadmaps.

Accountable for ensuring good management to oversee and continuously improve the quality, service, and efficiency of staff, products and processes. Follows and enforces necessary compliance.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Culture

• Carry out management responsibilities in accordance with the organization's policies, procedures, and applicable laws
• Build an inclusive, psychologically safe culture; resolve conflict constructively; model One-Team behaviours.
• Provides effective line management to direct reports and acts as an independent escalation point
• Conduct standard HR related duties such as absence management, performance management, disciplinaries, addressing complaints and resolving problem
• Participate in hiring processes, interviewing and develop onboarding plans of new team members
• Ensure all staff are provided with training and resources needed to perform their jobs to the most outstanding degree possible.
• Coach, mentor and support the professional development of individuals, provide with frequent feedback in order to meet and exceed individual and team performance goals consistently; fostering autonomy and ownership

Product & Delivery Excellence

• Own delivery outcomes: predictability, throughput, quality, and customer value-using metrics (e.g., cycle time, lead time, escaped defects, change failure rate).
• Drive planning, capacity & dependency management; ensure delivery plans are feasible and transparent.
• Balance product growth opportunities with technical enablement (tech debt, reliability, security) using clear trade‑off decisions.
• Serve as engineering voice in roadmap prioritisation and discovery; ensure requirements are clear, testable, and aligned to architecture constraints.
• Collaborate with direct reports and various stakeholders to support the development and maintenance of the technical roadmap, ensuring roadmap planning is well thought out technically and will be successful
• Proactively surface risks and mitigations; manage external dependencies and vendor/partner engagement.
• Serve as the initial point of escalation for software development issues within the specific area of responsibility leading on
• Manage and encourage new ideas from team members to foster improvements through innovations
• Interface with Product, UX, other technical personnel, or team members to finalise requirements
• Write and reviews portions of detailed specifications for the development of system components of moderate complexity
• Work closely with other development team members to understand moderately complex product requirements and translate them into software designs
• Ensure platform and features are compliant

Technical Excellence & Innovation

• Align with domain/platform tech leads and the architecture function to drive standards, patterns, and reusability.
• Collaborate with team and domain tech leads on platform architecture, cross functional requirements and complex data models
• Ensure API and integration designs are robust, reliable and fault tolerant, versioned, observable, secure, and well‑documented.
• Ensure sufficient & relevant technical documentation is available so that any staff can get up to speed quickly with the technical concerns of the product and services leading on
• Maintain a healthy technical estate: modernisation, simplification, deprecations; manage technical debt with a transparent backlog and guardrails, so that the technical burden is kept in equilibrium
• Provide technical assurance(…??? The last part truncated)

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