Engineering Lead, Software Architect

The Engineering Lead is accountable for the technical leadership, delivery effectiveness, engineering quality, people development and operational health of an Engineering Pod. The Engineering Lead translates approved architectural direction and Technical Design Documents (TDDs) into implementation-ready technical detail, collaborates with Business Analysts and Quality Assurance during technical story refinement, and ensures the pod can deliver secure, supportable and high-quality software in line with agreed engineering and architectural standards.

• Review TDDs and architectural direction received from Architecture.
• Identify gaps, ambiguities, technical risks and dependencies before implementation.
• Expand the TDD with implementation-level detail required by the Engineering Pod.
• Define affected services/components, APIs, integrations/events, database/data impacts, configuration, security and deployment considerations.
• Resolve architectural questions with the responsible Architect and document material technical decisions.
• Ensure significant development does not start without sufficient technical clarity.

• Participate actively with BAs and QA in Technical Story Time/refinement.
• Provide technical input into stories, acceptance considerations, dependencies and non-functional requirements.
• Ensure stories are technically feasible, sufficiently decomposed and estimable.
• Own the technical elements of the Definition of Ready.
• Ensure Engineers can reasonably pick up an approved story and begin implementation without avoidable ambiguity.

• Facilitate technically sound estimation with the engineers closest to the work.
• Challenge assumptions, dependencies and complexity where estimates are not sufficiently supported.
• Track delivery health, identify blockers early and escape material risks.
• Drive predictable delivery against agreed commitments while avoiding quality shortcuts.
• Ensure required time logging and delivery administration are completed accurately

• Ensure an effective peer code-review process exists and agreed engineering standards are applied.
• Use Senior Engineers to review normal changes; personally engage on complex, high-risk or architecturally significant changes.
• Drive unit/integration testing, maintainability, security and appropriate technical documentation.
• Track and reduce recurring code-quality issues and technical debt.

• Treat Development and QA as one Engineering Pod with one delivery outcome.
• Partner with QA to ensure testability, regression impact and automation opportunities are considered early.
• Ensure release-readiness concerns are visible and resolved or explicitly accepted through the correct governance.
• Review UAT and production defect trends and drive corrective actions

• Hold regular 1:1s and provide timely, constructive performance feedback.
• Coach and mentor Senior, Intermediate and Junior Engineers and support QA capability development.
• Maintain awareness of skills gaps, capacity, leave, succession and key-person dependencies.
• Create development opportunities and delegate decision-making appropriately.
• Participate in recruitment, interviewing, onboarding and performance management for the pod.

• Ensure solutions are supportable, observable and operationally ready.
• Support effective incident resolution and ensure appropriate root-cause analysis is completed.
• Ensure recurring incidents and reliability risks are converted into corrective engineering work.
• Promote appropriate logging, monitoring, rollback/recovery and deployment readiness

• Maintain accurate…