Engineering Manager

Location:
Hybrid – Remote - With quarterly travel to Wilmslow HQ

Salary:
Competitive

We are The Citation Group - a collective of businesses dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized enterprises across a range of essential services. We know that running a business means juggling a lot. Our mission is to ease these pressures by providing expertise, guidance, and solutions that enable business leaders to focus on what they do best. From HR and Health & Safety to Cybersecurity, E-Learning, and ISO compliance, we’ve got you covered.

Citation has achieved strong growth through a combination of organic expansion and strategic acquisitions, continually broadening our expertise, services, and reach to create a one-stop shop that supports businesses across the UK, Canada and Australia.

Lead multiple engineering teams to deliver secure, reliable, high-quality products at pace.

You will drive modern engineering practices, Dev Ops maturity and AI-enabled ways of working across both our products and software delivery processes.

Working closely with Product, Design, Architects and Tech Leads, you will help shape technical direction, improve delivery effectiveness, and coach teams to build, ship and operate software successfully.

We are looking for someone with strong hands‑on experience using and scaling AI in engineering environments, particularly AI/agentic coding assistants, and AI-enabled product capabilities.

• Lead, coach, and support multiple cross‑functional engineering teams and tech leads.
• Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Run regular 1:1s, provide clear feedback and support career development and performance management.
• Grow leadership capability within teams so decisions can be made effectively at the right level.
• Support hiring, onboarding and retention to build diverse, high‑performing teams.

• Provide technical leadership without becoming a bottleneck, enabling strong engineering decisions across teams.

• TDD/BDD, Clean Code, pair, and mob programming
• Automated testing across unit, integration, end‑to‑end and performance levels
• Secure SDLC practices from design through deployment
• Work with architects and senior engineers to evolve robust, observable, secure and cost‑effective cloud‑native architectures.
• Maintain a strong understanding of technologies including:
• .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP, and related frameworks
• JavaScript/Type Script, React and modern front‑end development
• Relational and No
  
  SQL databases

• Drive adoption of AI and automation within engineering workflows and product capabilities.
• Identify opportunities where AI can improve quality, reduce manual effort or enable new customer value.
• Lead effective adoption of AI/agentic coding assistants across coding, testing, documentation and operational workflows.
• Ensure AI usage aligns with security, privacy and compliance standards.
• Run lightweight experiments and spikes to validate AI use cases and measure impact.
• Collaborate with internal or external AI/ML specialists and vendors to integrate AI services into products and platforms.
• Support the full lifecycle of AI‑enabled features from prototype through to production monitoring and operation.

• Partner with Product Managers and Product Owners to define outcomes, priorities, roadmaps and delivery plans.
• Ensure teams deliver small, frequent, high‑quality increments and manage dependencies proactively.
• Communicate clearly with stakeholders on priorities, risks, trade‑offs and delivery scope.
• Contribute to cross‑team planning, portfolio alignment, and architectural review…