Software Engineering Manager – Forecasting & Rostering, Capacity Management, Platform Enablemen[...] in Windsor

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.

Problem Solving & Decision Making

Nature of Thinking Required: Solves complex technical challenges across forecasting, planning, workflow, and integration domains. Balances architectural sustainability with delivery constraints and operational needs.

Decisions – Owned

• Technical design decisions for squad owned services
• Engineering patterns, NFRs and quality standards
• Prioritisation of technical risks and engineering improvements
• CI/CD, operational readiness and incident‑handling processes

Decisions – Influenced

• Product roadmap priorities
• Cross team architectural decisions
• Funding for technical enablers
• Field Ops workflow design and data requirements

Leadership

Acts as a senior technical leader and role model for modern engineering practices. Mentors engineers across squads, fostering strong engineering culture and continuous learning. Shapes capability uplift through coaching, technical reviews, knowledge sharing and guild/community leadership. Advocates for secure, reliable, scalable engineering practices across the Field Ops domain. Drives alignment and strategic decision‑making across technology and product teams.

What We Need From You – Work Experience & Technical Skills

• Proven experience shaping and delivering technology strategy in a complex engineering environment.
• Strong hands on experience in at least one core programming language (language agnostic hiring).
• Expertise in API management, integration patterns, event‑driven architectures and microservices.
• Strong understanding of data management, data modelling and data quality controls.
• Ability to produce high level and detailed design specifications.
• Experience running DevOps practices including CI/CD, observability, monitoring and incident management.
• Demonstrated capability in leading multi squad engineering execution in a product‑led organisation.

Mindset & Ways of Working

• Comfortable working in iterative, outcome focused, agile environments.
• Open to new tools, automation and AI assisted engineering approaches.
• Highly collaborative across product, engineering, design and operations.
• Strong problem solver with a simplification and continuous improvement mindset.

Core Competencies & Technical Skills (AI and emerging technology)

• Designs, integrates and operates AI‑enabled solutions within enterprise environments, including prompt‑driven workflows, retrieval‑augmented systems and AI agents.
• Applies structured evaluation, testing and monitoring practices to ensure AI outputs are reliable, secure and compliant with organisational guardrails.
• Prepares and manages data used in AI workflows and takes responsibility for the responsible lifecycle of AI features from experimentation through deployment and continuous improvement.

Benefits

Our priority is supporting all of the different realities our people face. Life is about so much more than work. We have designed our total rewards to give you the flexibility to choose what you need, when you need it, ensuring that you and your family are supported not only financially, but physically and emotionally.