Team Lead – Panel Systems

Reality Mine has been a pioneer in delivering data driven insights to the world's largest brands for over a decade. Our platform provides unique data solutions to our clients enabling them to make strategic, informed decisions powered by data from real people, collected in a privacy safe way.

We’re looking for a Team Lead for a small team within our Panel Systems (Portal) area - building and maintaining the dashboards and APIs we use to integrate with clients and vendors for running large-scale market research panels.

You’ll be responsible for people leadership, technical direction and delivery for your team. You should be comfortable going deep on architecture and trade-offs, challenging decisions and assumptions.

Our offices are in Trafford Park, Manchester and the role consists of hybrid working, where we ask for our team to be in the office for collaboration and team building 2 days per week. The rest of the week is up to you; deep focus at home, or more of the same!

• Own delivery for your team within Panel Systems (Portal) – scope, sequencing, and trade-offs – keeping work aligned with product and business priorities
• Line-manage a small team of engineers building and maintaining Portal applications, APIs, and supporting services used by internal teams and panellists, including regular 1:1s, feedback, and career development
• Work with team on the evolution of the Portal architecture, improving scalability, maintainability, and consistency across systems
• Contribute to development of features and maintenance of the applications
• Support automation, tooling, and platform improvements that increase delivery speed and quality
• Hire and onboard engineers, and run fair, well-calibrated performance reviews against Reality Mine’s framework
• Help establish and maintain good engineering practices within the Portal domain, including observability, testing, documentation, and incident response
• Ensure your team delivers reliable, secure, and performant systems, supporting panel engagement and data collection
• Represent your team’s work to Product and other Engineering teams, translating business priorities into technical plans and vice versa
• Collaborate with the team to shape a balanced roadmap of technical improvements, debt, and feature work
• Uphold Reality Mine’s policies on security, quality, data privacy, and compliance (e.g. ISO 27001) within your team
• Adhering to Company Policies and Procedures with respect to Security, Quality and Health & Safety.

You bring solid experience in software engineering, modern web and backend systems, along with some experience of — or clear potential for — people leadership. You’re keen to grow as a manager, building a team that delivers reliable, secure, and scalable portal platforms that support panel management, engagement, and data capture.

You must have:

• Experience managing or mentoring software engineers, with hiring, performance, and career development
• Solid technical background in modern web and backend systems, including APIs and cloud platforms such as AWS, Serverless, Lambda, PHP, Laravel, Angular, React
• Experience and confidence in using AI tooling for general purpose and software engineering tasks
• Experience contributing to or delivering customer-facing or internal product platforms
• Knowledge of agile software development methodologies and delivery practices
• Clear, direct communicator, able to work effectively with a range of stakeholders
• Comfortable engaging with architecture, system design, and engineering trade-offs with your team, challenging historic assumptions and decisions.

You should have:

• Experience with automation (test automation, AI-assisted workflows, etc)
• Familiarity with data privacy and governance (e.g. GDPR, consented…