Lead Software Engineer in Haywards Heath

We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across a defined area of our Focus Application estate. In this role, you’ll guide, coach, and mentor engineers within cross‑functional teams, while taking a hands‑on approach to designing, building, and maintaining bespoke software and services that support the business and enable it to grow. This is a flexible hybrid role, with occasional visits to our offices in Salford Quays (Manchester) or Haywards Heath (West Sussex) when required. For those based further afield, we also welcome applications from remote UK‑based workers. We offer excellent flexibility in working patterns and a company‑wide culture you can be proud to be part of.

Benefits

People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive.

Core Responsibilities

• Act as the leading technical voice within an Agile Scrum team across the full development stack.
• Lead in the support of existing, and the creation of new, applications & services written in both older and modern technologies.
• Work closely with Solution Architects, Business Analysts and Product Owners to design modern, robust, workable solutions.
• Enforce the production of high‑quality, high‑usage and high‑availability solutions.
• Ensure software designs follow and enforce the technical guidelines & principles of the overarching enterprise architecture model.
• Actively advise and feed into the architectural team on engineering best practices, new technologies and their future use cases to help drive the emergent architecture.
• Act as the custodian of product level architecture designs and documentation ensuring the team fully documents each product and software process.
• Actively participate in peer groups to push forward new ideas, process improvements and engineering best practices.
• Keep yourself up to date with current technology trends, new ideas and ways of working and have a general passion of all things tech.
• Advise the team in new technologies, development tools and techniques.
• Actively support the software engineering team particularly in coding practices, standards and promoting a DevOps culture, tools, and approach.
• Undertake Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) responsibilities supporting the SRE function in an acting‑up capacity, whilst working as a Lead Product Engineer.
• Guide, coach & mentor other engineers working in cross functional teams and encourage their own learning and development.

Qualifications & Technical & Architectural Understanding

• Good understanding of a service‑based approach to technology, including component, service‑oriented, and event‑driven architectures.
• C# .NET Development: Experience developing within a C# .NET environment, with emphasis on asynchronous programming, dependency injection, Entity Framework, and unit testing.
• Database skills: Significant knowledge and capability working with SQL.
• Cloud Architecture & Engineering: Experience designing and implementing software using cloud‑based technologies, preferably within Azure.
• Leadership & People Management: Strong ability to lead by example, motivate others, and foster a collaborative team environment.
• Analytical & Problem‑Solving Skills: Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills.
• Time Management & Organisation: Good time management and organisational skills.
• CI/CD Processes: Experience in CI/CD processes and standard development tooling.
• Mentoring: Experience leading/mentoring a small squad of engineers.
• Frontend: Excellent HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web development experience particularly in a SPA language (Angular).
• SQL: Strong SQL writing and general database design experience.
• Design Patterns: Working knowledge and understanding of common software design patterns and building software to SOLID principles.
• Unit Testing: Working knowledge and experience of writing Unit Tests.
• Operational/Transactional Enterprise Experience: Experience working within an operational/transactional enterprise business.
• Communication: Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written.

Key Behaviours

• Emphasis on attention to detail and accuracy.
• Self‑motivated and enthusiastic.
• An organised and proactive approach.
• Ability to work on own initiative and as part of a team.
• A flexible approach and positive attitude.
• Strives to drive improvements that contribute to the success of the business.