Software Engineering Lead

Ready to shape engineering at scale? As our Engineering Lead, you'll drive the platforms and tooling that help teams deliver faster, safer, and smarter.

Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances.

Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. Learn more here - , to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead to provide technical leadership for one of our teams. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations - the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely.

This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

The Role Technical Leadership Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers - balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability

Guide API and domain design standards - clear service boundaries, consistent contracts, and pragmatic integration between modern services and legacy systems

Shape event-driven and integration patterns so teams can build independently without breaking cross-squad journeys

Champion automated testing, observability, and production readiness for backend services - PHPUnit, Go tests, Datadog, and safe release practices

Oversee database and schema evolution practices - migrations, data integrity, and performance - in partnership with platform and infrastructure teams

Lead incident response for backend-owned systems - triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality

Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, Security, Performance and Optimisation - raising the bar through design review and hands-on contribution when needed

Support production readiness for high-risk changes - coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross-team dependencies at the legacy/modern boundary

Delivery Leadership Lead delivery of complex, multi-team initiatives by managing dependencies, resources, and blockers

Define and drive technical strategy, improving engineering practices and delivery processes

Build strong partnerships across product, engineering, security, and business teams

Keep teams focused on priorities while balancing technical debt and operational needs

Drive collaboration across teams and lead cross-engineering initiatives with fellow Engineering Leads.

People & Developer experience

Lead, coach, and mentor engineers to strengthen delivery and technical leadership

Stay hands-on when needed, contributing to designs, code, and operational improvements

Enhance developer experience through better tooling, documentation, and onboarding

Support hiring and help raise the bar for engineering talent

Empower teams to take ownership while providing guidance and direction where needed What you’ll bring

Leadership & delivery

Ability to align technical decisions with delivery timelines, reliability targets, and business needs

Expertise in championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality, and operational stability

Skill in reviewing and contributing to technical designs that meet quality and security standards

Strong stakeholder management and communication skills at all levels

Capability to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership

Strategic and tactical decision-making abilities

Commitment to creating an empowering team environment that prioritises customer experience and engineering productivity

Technical experience

Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast-growing, regulated environments (fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance)
Deep expertise in at least one engineering discipline relevant to your squad - backend, frontend, mobile, quality, or platform operations - with solid breadth across design, build, test, and run Track record of owning production systems end-to-end: implementation, rollout, monitoring, incident response, and follow-up Experience leading technical delivery on complex, ambiguous initiatives involving multiple engineers, dependencies, or teams

Strong architectural judgement - evaluating trade-offs, setting direction, and aligning others on pragmatic, maintainable solutions

Expertise in automated testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices in high-stakes production environments

Familiarity with observability and operational excellence - monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and blameless learning from incidents

Understanding of security, compliance, and non-functional requirements in regulated financial services

Comfortable working across modern and legacy systems - evolving the platform incrementally rather than through unnecessary rewrites

Ability to stay hands-on - contributing to code, designs, and reviews when that is the fastest way to reduce risk or unblock the team

What we offer

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