Software Engineering Manager in Stoke-on-Trent

Join us, be part of more. We're so much more than an energy company. We're a family of brands revolutionising how we power the planet. We're energisers. One team of 21,000 colleagues that's energising a greener, fairer future by creating an energy system that doesn't rely on fossil fuels, whilst living our powerful commitment to igniting positive change in our communities. Here, you can find more purpose, more passion, and more potential. That's why working here is #MoreThanACareer.

We do energy differently - we do it all. We make it, store it, move it, sell it, and mend it. Centrica, Technology is a core driver of how we deliver our strategy. You'll join a team modernising our platforms, strengthening cyber and operational resilience, and advancing a product-led way of working that brings engineers, data specialists and business experts together to deliver meaningful outcomes at pace. We're scaling automation and AI from proof-of-concept into real, end-to-end change - improving customer journeys, reducing cost-to-serve, accelerating delivery, and building the digital foundations that underpin everything from energy trading and risk to field operations and critical infrastructure.

If you want to work on complex, high-impact problems using modern engineering practices, and help build reusable platforms that will shape how Centrica operates over the next decade, this is the place to do it.

The Software Engineering Manager provides senior technical leadership, engineering governance and delivery oversight for the Field Operations Platform. The role ensures that platform features, integrations and non-functional capabilities are engineered to a high standard, supporting accurate forecasting, workforce planning and safe, efficient customer service delivery. This role is expected to use automation, data and AI enabled tooling to reduce manual effort, enhance engineering quality, improve cycle times and increase reliability, while retaining full human accountability for technical judgement, decisions and outcomes.

Day to day:

• Provide senior technical leadership across Field Operations squads - Define engineering standards, architectural patterns and technical direction, ensuring the platform is scalable, resilient and aligned with Centrica's technology strategy.
• Own the end to end software development lifecycle across multiple squads - Ensure teams follow robust engineering practices throughout discovery, design, build, testing, deployment and operations, consistently meeting business and non-functional requirements.
• Guide complex design decisions and technical solutioning - Lead technical reviews, challenge design options, and ensure solutions follow best practice, reduce duplication, and promote maintainable, secure and performant systems.
• Enhance delivery capability through platform reliability and DevOps maturity - Continuously improve deployment pipelines, observability, alerting, incident handling, recovery procedures and operational readiness across Field Ops engineering teams.
• Manage stakeholders and ensure transparent communications - Build strong relationships across product, operations, delivery and business teams to coordinate plans, manage risk, align on priorities and ensure clarity of expectations.
• Drive engineering excellence and uplift team capability - Track, analyse and improve engineering excellence metrics; coach engineers and promote a culture of learning, continuous improvement, and high-quality engineering.
• Support data-driven and API-centric integration design - Ensure APIs, integrations, and data flows are designed with consistent patterns, strong data quality, security, scalability and operational resilience.
• Improve how work is done - Identify opportunities to simplify processes, reduce technical debt, automate repetitive tasks, use AI-assisted engineering, and enhance developer experience.

Key Stakeholders:

The Software Engineering Manager works closely with the Head of Engineering to align on engineering strategy, technical priorities and delivery performance. They partner frequently with Product Managers to translate business needs into technical solutions and ensure roadmap clarity. Collaboration with Field Operations SMEs ensures platform enhancements meet operational, safety and compliance requirements. The SEM supports several engineering squads, guiding design decisions, improving engineering practices and resolving technical issues. Partnerships with Security, Quality Engineering, Architecture, SRE and DevOps teams ensure compliance with Centrica standards and operational resilience. They also coordinate with programme, planning and delivery teams to manage dependencies, risks and communications. In addition, the role builds relationships with external partners and tooling providers (such as Microsoft and Datadog) through hackathons, roadmap discussions and innovation sessions to explore performance, monitoring and platform optimisation opportunities.