Lead Software Engineer

What you'll be doing:

• Owning the technical delivery of a project or subsystem end-to-end – design, development, documentation and release – ensuring solutions are of a high engineering standard and fit for operational use.
• Defining and owning the technical quality processes for your engagement, including build pipelines, code quality, testing and source control.
• Leading client engagements for development, from project inception through to delivery, acting as the primary technical point of contact.
• Leading technical discussions and aligning stakeholders and teams around a resolution.
• Owning requirements analysis and solution design, translating business needs into robust technical architecture.
• Continually reviewing tools and processes to identify and drive improvements within your engagement, and advising clients on opportunities for improvement beyond it.
• Mentoring and supporting the growth of Mid-Level to Senior Engineers, including task-level support and technical quality coaching.
• Contributing to presales and pitches for new work, and building trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders.
• Building deep expertise in one or more technology ecosystems, and sharing that knowledge across both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Taking ownership for impact-assessing change and managing delivery risk.
• Ensuring the solutions you own are secure, scalable, observable and cost-optimised.
• Championing the effective and responsible use of AI-assisted engineering tools within your team, keeping abreast of new tooling and sharing learning across Answer.
• Identifying opportunities where AI-powered capabilities (for example LLM integrations or intelligent automation) could add value within client engagements, bringing in our AI Engineering capability where deeper specialist expertise is needed.

What you'll bring to Answer:

• Strong background in client-facing roles with excellent stakeholder management.
• Proven experience providing technical leadership to both engineering teams and clients.
• Hands-on experience leading the delivery of large-scale development projects.
• Experience mentoring and developing engineers.
• Agile software development experience with continuous delivery.
• .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, C#, SQL and NoSQL database experience.
• AWS/Azure experience.
• JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks.
• Strong understanding of Agile software development practices and tools.
• Confidence guiding a team’s adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools and practices safely and effectively.

It would be great if you also had experience in some of these, but if not we’ll help you with them:

• Client-facing experience gained from a technical consultancy or software vendor.
• Experience working directly with executive and director-level stakeholders.
• Technical leadership across multiple development teams.
• Defining technical solutions including integration with legacy systems.
• Experience of system-to-system integration and interoperability.
• Common design patterns, such as event-based architecture, CQRS or Domain-Driven Design.
• Experience integrating AI-powered features (for example LLM-based assistants or intelligent automation) into existing applications.
• Experience with platform engineering practices, such as building internal developer platforms, paved-road tooling or self-service infrastructure to improve delivery teams’ productivity.

The perks of being @ Answer:

• Competitive salary.
• Flexible annual leave (buy/sell and carry forward).
• Twice a year income-tax free bonus based on company performance – it’s a reward for being a part of our EOT journey.
• Continuous training and development – if you want to learn, we’ll provide the support you need.
• Flexible Pension – we match your own contributions up to 5%.
• A flexible Healthcare cash plan so you can fund the care you value most.
• A packed social calendar including end of year party (partners invited) and Summer away days, monthly and quarterly company team socials.
• Parking at Head Offices in central Leeds, plus Cycle2Work.