Lead Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer | Customer Identity Solutions

Salary | Up to £110,000

Hybrid | 2 days a week | London, UK

A large international consumer organisation with a diverse portfolio of customer-facing brands is undergoing a digital transformation to enhance the end-to-end customer experience. They're hiring a hands-on Lead Software Engineer to own the technical direction of customer identity management as the business continues expanding across the globe.

This is an engineering lead role, you'll stay close to the code, understand the architecture in depth, and be credible enough to challenge how things are being built.

Day one, you'll lead and manage third-party delivery partners who do the majority of the hands‑on build work — this isn't about building an in‑house team from scratch initially. Over time, the company retains technical ownership and guardianship of the codebase while vendors continue as the implementation arm.

• Own technical direction and architecture decisions for the customer identity platform
• Manage and hold accountable third‑party engineering partners delivering the day‑to‑day build
• Stay hands‑on across the stack — able to review, question, and where needed dig into code across front end, back end, cloud, and CI/CD
• Act as the technical guardian of the codebase, ensuring vendor output meets quality, security, and architectural standards
• Collaborate with stakeholders to prioritise initiatives and align technical delivery with business goals
• Report on platform performance, delivery progress, and technical risk

• Full‑stack engineering background — comfortable across the entire SDLC, not a front-end-only specialist
• Strong experience with React on the front end
• Solid understanding of cloud platforms and CI/CD/Dev Ops pipelines
• Proven ability to manage or oversee third-party engineering vendors/partners, holding them to account technically
• Identity and access management experience is a nice-to-have, not a requirement
• Strong technical judgement and the confidence to challenge delivery partners on design and implementation decisions