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 -

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for a Software 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. We're particularly interested in leaders who have experience working in fast-growing scale-ups or scaling technology organisations
, where they have built teams,
improved engineering maturity, led cloud and platform migration programmes
, and established the infrastructure, processes, and operational practices needed to support growth s is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

This is a hybrid role requiring working one to two days per month from the office.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast-growing, regulated environments (fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance)
• Experience leading cloud, infrastructure, and platform migrations in fast-growing environments, establishing scalable architectures and operational practices to support business growth.
• 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…