Ruby on Rails Lead Engineer in Potters Bar

Canada Life UK has helped individuals, families and businesses secure their financial futures for over 120 years. We are evolving into a more modern, customer‑centric, and engineering‑led organisation. As we modernise our IT estate and shift our focus towards cloud, SaaS/PaaS, and product‑centric delivery models, we are creating engineering excellence and empowered teams.

Job Purpose: We are now looking for a Lead Engineer to provide hands‑on technical leadership within our Home Finance product engineering team – the team responsible for the systems that power our mortgage origination and servicing capabilities.

Why join us?

• Shape the future of Home Finance: You will lead the technical evolution of our bespoke Ruby on Rails based mortgage origination and servicing platform, designing modern, resilient and scalable solutions.
• True empowerment and autonomy: You will be in a hands‑on role where you influence architecture, delivery, operational excellence and culture across the product.
• Modern engineering focus: You will drive adoption of agile, DevSecOps and modern engineering practices, optimising the flow of change and reducing time to value.

Key Duties/Responsibilities: This is a hands‑on Lead Engineer role in a stream‑aligned product engineering team, focused on the Home Finance application stack. You will set and uphold technical standards, guide solution design and support the team in delivering high‑quality, compliant software that underpins our Home Finance operations and customer outcomes.

In This Role Responsibilities Include:

• Lead, coach and inspire engineers in a stream‑aligned product team, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, psychological safety and high performance.
• Deepen our adoption of agile, DevSecOps and modern engineering practices, optimising the flow of change and reducing time to value.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally to deliver secure, stable and scalable solutions that support Home Finance operations and customer outcomes.
• Ensure regulatory compliance (including FCA MCOB) and operational excellence across the platform.
• Shape the technology roadmap, contributing to architectural decisions and cloud migration strategies.
• Manage operational risk, security posture, monitoring, alerting and incident response for Home Finance systems.
• Use data and insights to guide prioritisation, engineering improvements and product decisions.
• Support the Engineering Manager with talent development to build a high performing engineering capability.
• Remove waste to improve cost efficiency and increase value delivery for our customers.
• Define and track team and departmental OKRs, ensuring alignment with Canada Life’s strategy.
• Build strong relationships with third‑party suppliers to maximise value and service quality.

Skills, Knowledge And Experience:

• Technical expertise: Bring strong, hands‑on engineering skills together with the breadth to lead a modern product‑centric team.
• Strong understanding of mortgage origination/administration systems or comparable regulated financial platforms.
• Experience delivering and operating web‑based MVC applications (e.g. Ruby on Rails, React) and APIs.
• Skilled in designing, managing and optimising relational SQL databases.
• Hands‑on knowledge of cloud platforms (Azure or GCP) and cloud‑native architectures.
• Broad engineering experience across DevSecOps, automation, CI/CD, infrastructure, monitoring and security best practice (“shift left”).
• Proven track record of running critical production services with a focus on stability, performance and security.
• Experience with React or other modern JavaScript frameworks is highly desirable, complementing our Ruby on Rails and JavaScript mortgage platform.
• Comfortable designing, building, testing, deploying and supporting software using agile and DevOps practices, and improving the route to production through automated CI/CD pipelines and environment support up to and including production.

Leadership and delivery:

• Experience helping build high‑performing, motivated and curious teams.
• Confident working with OKRs and outcome‑driven delivery.
• Able to communicate complex technical ideas simply and persuasively.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity, prioritising effectively and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Collaborative, pragmatic and adept at building trust across product, engineering and operational teams.
• Demonstrate strong teamwork, communication and problem‑solving skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross‑functional teams, alongside excellent time and self‑management through effective planning and prioritisation of tasks.
• Proven and demonstrable engineering capability, with experience leading on technical delivery.
• A passion for modern, inclusive engineering and the ability to inspire and develop others.

Benefits Of Working At Canada Life: We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benefits package that’s regularly reviewed. As a Canada Life UK colleague, you’ll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including a generous pension and bonus scheme, along with income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance. We have a fantastic number of other benefits and support services as well as regular personal and professional development.

How We Work At Canada Life: Our culture is unique and incredibly important to us. We care about doing the right thing for our people, customers and community and helping others to build better futures. Our blueprint behaviours shape and influence how we work, and are central to the relationships we have with others. Every day we are encouraged to be more curious, own the outcome, face into things together and find a way forward. We want colleagues to have rewarding careers with us so we invest in the development of our people, technology and workplaces. That’s why we offer a range of training, flexible working and opportunities to grow and develop.

Diversity and inclusion: Building an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce where everyone can feel they belong and achieve their potential regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other characteristic is a key commitment for us. We are proud of the progress we’re making in DEI, and we continue for it to be a significant focus.