Engineering Manager - FTC

Position: Engineering Manager - 12 Month FTC
About

The Role This is a Fixed Term Opportunity for 12 months covering parental leave. The Engineering Manager will lead and nurture a squad of 6-8 engineers. You'll be accountable for guiding your team through the entire lifecycle of building and maintaining our systems and products. As an experienced technical leader, you'll ensure your squad possesses the necessary technical depth and skills to consistently deliver high-quality solutions.

This involves hands-on engagement in key client projects, where you'll lead by example and meticulously assess the technical quality of the team's output. A core aspect of this role is fostering a thriving team environment. You'll cultivate a culture of open feedback, providing actionable insights to empower team members in their continuous learning, growth, and development. Your leadership will create a safe space where engineers feel supported, comfortable admitting mistakes, and confident in learning from every experience.

Responsibilities Develop strong client relationships as the primary technical contact for new and existing clients You are the primary technical contact for a subset of your teams clients, you develop their technical vision, and work with your team to develop solutions. You provide senior oversight and direction to the technical approach on all projects within your squad, either directly or by working with the project lead developers.

You champion our agile delivery model and provide support to teams to ensure that projects deliver on time and on budget without compromising quality. You work in partnership with the sector teams to identify opportunities to work with new and existing clients to provide consultancy services, enhancing the agency's positioning as a strategic partner. You advise your clients on overall technical strategy based on experience, industry trends and best practice, with the ability to challenge client thinking where appropriate.

You work confidently with senior client stakeholders, acting as a trusted advisor and expert. You work closely with the engineering team to produce technical solutions for clients. You manage the technical and support relationships with clients in your team You ensure your clients are supported with the appropriate team members. You ensure there is redundancy in your support teams to allow for holiday or any out of hours exceptions are covered.

You ensure the smooth operation of any support boards helping to unblock technical team members and resolve issues. You escalate high priority issues, with the wider team to ensure that they are resolved in a timely manner. You lead the delivery of high quality software solutions on time and to budget You ensure your project team members are fully engaged and participating in all aspects of the project and its administration during build phase You ensure all ceremonies of your Agile project are undertaken at the right time with the right people always present, including: standups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, code reviews and retrospectives.

You ensure your team delivers the work they have committed to for the agreed deadline You ensure your team is delivering work to meet or exceed the client expectations of quality You ensure your team is delivering work that meets the tech studios expectations of quality and that adhere to our standards You ensure your team is collaborating well at all times, problems are discussed early and raised to the delivery team and client as soon as possible You develop and lead an effective squad of between 6 and 8 software engineers, managing a subset of the technical studio You will build and maintain a strong, supportive squad of engineers.

You coach, mentor, train and inspire members of the technology team and help them develop their skills. You successfully onboard new technical team members so they are effective in their roles. You take accountability for the quality of delivery to all the clients and work with your squad and wider delivery team to ensure all clients have the development support they need.

You ensure that your squad is well utilised and meeting their billable targets. You join weekly meetings with the engineering director to discuss squad capacity, utilisation and to escalate any people or project concerns You take accountability for the effectiveness of any contractors assigned to your squad. You provide professional development coaching to your reports and help them to develop and action a professional development plan.

You understand and promote our company policies. You ensure all your direct reports are completing their administrative responsibilities within the squad (e.g. IT assessment is up-to-date) and holiday requests are booked sufficiently in advance and fully considered before approval. You ensure your reports are fulfilling their job role accountabilities to the best of their abilities and provide the appropriate feedback and encourage appropriate reflections to encourage and support…