Lead Software Engineer

and Jet2holidays are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our high-performance Search team. This is an exciting hands‑on role where you will be responsible for the functionality that powers the customer's first interaction with us, working across a breadth of systems and technologies to deliver value and Create Memories for both our business and our customers.

This is a role for a technical leader who loves data and solving complex problems. You won't just be building features; you'll be optimizing the engine that drives our business, ensuring that when a customer dreams of a holiday, we find it for them instantly and accurately.

As our Lead Software Engineer
, you’ll have access to a wide range of benefits including:

• Colleague discounts on flights and Jet2holidays packages
• Access to a generous discretionary profit share scheme

As our Lead Software Engineer
, you will be leading a fast‑paced scrum team, made up of a lead engineer, software engineers, automation and manual test engineers, product owners and business analysts. You will also:

• Design and code low-latency search algorithms and data structures in the core search applications, explicitly optimizing for performance to handle high-concurrency traffic without degrading the customer experience.
• Creatinga vision for designing and building robust and scalable systems.
• Makingarchitectural decisions in collaboration with the Architecture Teamfocusing on high-availability, low-latency, and caching strategies to handle massive user load during peak booking periods.
• Supportingteam activities through the software development lifecyclesuch as planning and estimation.
• Line managing and mentoringteam members to facilitate their growth and progression.
• Championingcurrent and new coding standards and practices.
• Drivinga culture of continuous improvement.
• Improving the developer experience through automation&tooling. You willdrive the implementation of CI/CD pipelines that ensure safety and quality, removing the need for manual intervention in live environments.
• Implementingobservability and metrics within the search stack. You will ensure the team has visibility into application performance, search accuracy, and error rates tofacilitaterapid debugging and data-driven improvements.

The search platform has a wide range of technologies including:

• C#, .NET Core, and Web API.
• RESTful Microservices – light-weight efficient, decoupled APIs that scale well.
• Cloud technologies (AWS)
• Containerised environments using Kubernetes,Dockerand CI/CD pipelines.
• Automated Testing frameworks with a strong focus on Performance and Load Testing (k6) alongside BDD.

Our Lead Software Engineer will have deep technical understanding of Search Engines and caching mechanisms in a high‑traffic e‑commerce environment, be extremely passionate about technology and have some previous line‑management experience. You will also:

• Have strong written and verbal communication skills and be comfortable communicating and building relationships with stakeholders across the business.
• Have priortechnicalleadership and mentoring experience and be willing to enhance your skills in this area to support the growth of software development team.
• Be an excellent role model for the team and colleagues, with an approachable nature and the ability to work as part of a team.
• Be the point of contact for expert guidance and team support.
• A mindset focused onDev Sec Opsand  Automation. You prefer building tools and guardrails over manual processes and have experience creating observable systems.
• Experience managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and understanding the impact of latency on user behaviour.