Senior Engineering Manager

Overview

As Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead a domain of 6–10 teams (~60–90 engineers) and report to the Director of Engineering. You’ll shape how work flows between teams, develop Engineering Managers, and align engineering work with product and business goals. The role balances people leadership with technical and delivery influence, improving delivery speed, quality, and platform stability. You’ll operate in a public-sector context, shaping legacy and modern systems while driving data-driven change. You’ll join a mission-driven company focused on delivering essential public services at scale.

Pay / Benefits

• 25 Days Annual Leave + bank holidays
• option to buy up to 10 extra days
• Volunteering days
• Pension Contributions – 5% employer match
• Income Protection – up to 75% salary
• Life Assurance – 4x salary tax-free

Responsibilities

• Coaching and developing Engineering Managers and senior engineers across the domain, guiding technical judgement and career growth.
• Structuring and restructuring teams to close skill gaps, avoid dependencies, and optimize capacity.
• Maintaining a high-performing standard across the domain and addressing under-performance.
• Building a hiring and retention engine to grow the domain’s talent and mobility.
• First-line delivery escalation, providing context and path forward for cross-team issues.
• Coordinating workstreams, delegating decisions to EMs with clear boundaries, and ensuring follow-through.
• Partnering with Product and commercial stakeholders to define metrics, scope, and trade-offs.
• Applying team-topology thinking to design deliberate team boundaries and interaction patterns.
• Staying close to technical detail via EMs, ensuring quality while avoiding hands-on contribution.
• Driving operational maturity (testing, observability, incident response) with teams.
• Building credible business cases for structural or technical investments grounded in need.
• Representing domain priorities to peers and senior leadership and aligning with wider engineering.
• Challenging status quo constructively and forming evidence-based views.

Key requirements

• Track record of managing managers across a multi-team domain of comparable scale.
• Strong technical grounding to hold architectural discussions across legacy and modern systems.
• Evidence-based leadership using delivery and quality data to make decisions.
• Genuine partnership with Product and commercial stakeholders and ability to speak to business outcomes.
• Coaching orientation focused on delegation and growth, not doing others’ jobs.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to create clarity in evolving domains.

• coaching and mentorship
• cross-functional collaboration
• data-driven decision making
• architectural direction and sense-checking across mixed legacy and modern systems
• team-topology thinking (Conway’s Law)
• operational maturity: testing, observability, incident response

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