Tech Lead Manager

This role offers a competitive package, hybrid working (1 day a week in the London office, typically Thursday), 28 days holiday a year plus Bank Holidays and 11% pension from the second year!

Who are we? Which? is the UK's consumer champion, here to make life simpler, fairer and safer for everyone. As an organisation we're not for profit and all for making consumers more powerful. Come and champion consumers with us – it's important work. As people we are brave, caring, rigorous and insightful in the way we connect with each other to make change happen.

What do we expect:

• We are looking for an experienced technical leader, team leader and people manager to co-lead a cross functional, mission oriented product squad alongside a Product Manager and Design Lead. This hybrid role is perfect for people wishing to remain close to delivery, love building high performing teams and staying close to technology with an element of hands-on contribution (~30% of time).

Primary responsibilities will be:

• Team Leadership: Working as part of a “product trio” alongside a Product Manager and Design Lead you will collectively establish a Product Vision for your domain and a strategy to bring your vision to life. You will set ambitious OKRs for your team and own delivery of impact.
• Tech Leadership: Work with engineers to establish a technical vision and strategy that enables (and in some cases informs) the product vision. Guide the team to make good technical decisions that are aligned with squad objectives and longer term ambition. Able to operate hands-on at a Senior Engineer level and set the bar for engineering excellence, whilst appreciating that the primary role is to build a great team and support engineers to succeed.
• People Management: You will support 5-7 engineers in the following areas: understanding challenges and providing support, seeking and giving feedback, establishing plans for professional and career growth and pastoral care.

We believe that great Tech Lead Managers have the following characteristics:

• Problem Solver: Your team will be given “problems to solve” or “opportunities to seize” and you will be comfortable leading through uncertainty and ambiguity. You will be an influential member of the team championing a curious product mindset focussing on delivering business outcomes. Commercially minded with experience of driving significant revenues or cost savings through technology & product innovation.
• Practice Evolutionary Architecture: You will guide architectural direction across your domains. Our teams own their software end-to-end and you will be comfortable leading across front-end and back-end (we appreciate you may bias towards one or the other). The architecture is never “done” - it is evolved incrementally in response to our members needs and operating context. Open to all kinds of technology that can be useful and help drive our business forward.
• Multiplier: You will level up engineers in your area through use of standards and modern engineering approaches. Ability to mentor early stage and mid level engineering to Seniors.
• People centric: Truly believes that building an inclusive and collaborative team based environment is a prerequisite for high performance and that this is their primary job. Brings people together to achieve things they never thought possible.
• Strong bias to action: Acts with urgency, breaking large seemingly insurmountable problems into smaller, more manageable problems, that can be validated and executed at pace (days/weeks not quarters/half years).

You will be supported by an Engineering Manager who will typically support 3-4 teams.

What kind of work might I Do?

Our content publishing and web presentation platform serves millions of users per month. We need to review our monolithic web architecture to be able to support increased scale in terms of visiting members and more teams working on the platform. What is suitable architecture and how do we get there incrementally? We see a huge opportunity in unlocking value from our data. This could be:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of how our members use our site to enable us to provide better content experiences (e.g. recommendations).
• Reducing effort and time to build data products and internal tools. We have lots of data that has the potential to be monetised.
• Search and conversational AI - helping our members quickly find the answers they need.

You will work closely with Heads of Product Engineering, Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers and Product Managers to create and deliver a product engineering strategy.

How might I progress my career?

The Tech Lead Manager sits on our management track and it's common for tech lead managers to progress to become Engineering Managers supporting multiple teams. However, we are very open for Tech Lead Managers to switch to our technical track and focus purely on technical leadership and advance to become a principal engineer (our most senior engineering leadership level).

Interview Process:

• Meet one of our Engineering leadership via video (approximately 45 minutes) - Opportunity for you to learn more about the role, answer any questions you have, and provide some examples of providing technical direction across multiple teams and driving product outcomes through technology.
• Technical Take home Test (Typescript).
• System Design & Technical Interview via video (90 Mins).
• Leadership Interview covering: Team/Product Leadership, culture and people management (60 mins).

We also have these benefits for you to consider:

• 35 hour working week.
• Generous 28 days holiday a year plus Bank Holidays & Option to buy additional days.
• Excellent pension scheme – when you pay in 3%, Which? pays in 6% (rising to 11% after one year of service).
• Discount site Pluxee which offers large %% off every day shopping and holidays.
• Annual Award (depending on employee and company performance).
• Healthcare insurance & Private medical insurance and opportunity to participate in Vitality rewards programme (at 6 months).
• A discretionary death in service benefit provision equivalent to six times your annual salary.
• Free access to Which? member content and free access to Which? money & legal helplines.
• Free wills for all Which? employees, plus, partners of employees can make their will at cost price.
• Work from (almost) anywhere for 4 weeks of the year policy.

About Which?

We promote a great work-life balance (all our roles are now hybrid), offering flexible working options in addition to a full time working week (35 hours) e.g. part time or job shares where possible. If you wish to discuss any of these options, please contact the Resourcing team at resourcing@which.co.uk.

At Which? we value diversity and we're committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone is able to be themselves and to reach their full potential. We are proud that we are in the ‘Top 25 Inclusive Employers' List and currently ranking 3rd. We want to receive applications from everyone. We believe that a diverse workforce helps us to understand and create a positive impact for consumers.

As a Disability Confident Leader, we ensure that everyone can apply and be part of our recruitment processes and so we'll make reasonable adjustments if you need them. For this or any other assistance you need with applying (i.e., would like to apply by phone or post), email recruitment@which.co.uk.

Find out more about the Disability Confident Interview Scheme.

Please note you must meet the essential criteria listed within the Role Profile, to have your application reviewed and we reserve the right to withdraw this advert at any given time due to the number of applications received.

We’re committed to making sure our application process is accessible to everyone who would like to apply for any of our vacancies! Please reach out to resourcing@which.co.uk if you need us to provide an alternative application method to support your accessibility needs.

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