Lead Engineer (Digital Product Team)

Location: London, Watford, Bristol or Isle of Man (Hybrid working options available)

Are you ready to help lead a dynamic cross-functional team building the future of digital products? We are seeking an exceptional Lead Engineer to join our technical leadership team and champion outstanding, user-centred experiences. You will be one of several Lead Engineers in Digital who work together as a collaborative technical leadership team, each bringing a particular area of specialism. Yours will be UI/UX, accessibility, and front-end performance, and you will lean on your fellow Leads for their specialisms just as they will lean on you for yours.

This role is ideal for a broad, T-shaped engineer who leads from the front and brings real depth in user-facing product engineering. If you are passionate about Digital products, technology, and driving meaningful outcomes for our customers, this is the role for you!

CLUK have ambitious plans to modernise their IT (Information Technology) estate, looking to leverage the cloud and automation at every opportunity and change how we fundamentally deliver solutions, transitioning from a Project to Product approach.

You will work at every stage of the product lifecycle, from discovery and design, through implementation and testing, to operational support, keeping the customer experience at the centre throughout.

Job Purpose

As a Lead Engineer you will have a strong background in full lifecycle software development, and, as the technical leadership team's specialist in user-facing products, you will help set the standard for how we design and build them. You combine hands-on engineering excellence with technical leadership, and you have a particular passion for crafting accessible, high-performing, and genuinely delightful user experiences.

• Designing, building, deploying, and supporting software across front and backend stacks, with particular craft on the front end
• Leading the design and delivery of accessible, responsive, component-oriented user interfaces that meet recognised accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA)
• Championing front-end performance, optimising load and runtime experience and keeping our Core Web Vitals healthy
• Configuring and maintaining automated CI/CD pipelines and test automation to facilitate a seamless route to production for Azure hosted solutions
• Working with your fellow Lead Engineers to set shared technical direction and engineering standards, contributing your UI/UX specialism, and coaching other engineers to raise the bar across the team

Above all you will have a deeply customer-centric mindset: you get close to real users, validate ideas through research and experimentation, and measure success by customer outcomes rather than output. You use data and user feedback to make informed decisions and to ensure our products work brilliantly for everyone.

Duties/Responsibilities

• Work as part of Digital's technical leadership team, a group of Lead Engineers who collaboratively set direction and own our engineering standards, with each Lead bringing a particular area of specialism. You will be our specialist voice on UI/UX, accessibility, and front-end performance, while sharing responsibility for the wider technical agenda alongside your peers. Coach and mentor other engineers, lead by example with hands-on contribution, and help teams make sound architectural and design decisions. Extend your influence beyond your immediate team as an active member of our engineering community.
• Engage fully in the development lifecycle of applications and tools, contributing hands-on from coding to reviewing and releasing to production. Lead the craft of our user interfaces, collaborating closely with designers, product owners, and stakeholders to deliver accessible, performant, and intuitive experiences that customers love.
• Keep customers at the heart of what we build. Get close to real users, use research, usability testing, and experiments to validate hypotheses, and measure the outcomes your work delivers so the team can continuously improve. Make inclusive, accessible design a default so our products work for the widest possible audience.
• Implement and refine DevOps practices, balancing responsibilities between development and operations, while actively reducing technical debt and enhancing the automation and reliability of applications.