Software Engineering Manager - In-Life Domain in Windsor

We’re so much more than an energy company. We’re a family of brands revolutionising how we power the planet. One team of 21,000 colleagues energises a greener, fairer future by creating an energy system that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels while igniting positive change in our communities. Central to our strategy, technology modernises platforms, strengthens cyber and operational resilience, and advances a product‑led way of working that brings engineers, data specialists and business experts together to deliver meaningful outcomes at pace.

The Software Engineering Manager provides senior technical leadership, engineering governance, and delivery oversight for the Field Operations Platform. The role ensures platform features, integrations and non‑functional capabilities are engineered to a high standard, supporting accurate forecasting, workforce planning and safe, efficient customer service delivery. It leverages automation, data and AI‑enabled tooling to reduce manual effort, enhance engineering quality, improve cycle times and increase reliability.

Location: UK‑based hybrid role, occasional travel to site.

Responsibilities:

• 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 clarify 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.
• Identify opportunities to simplify processes, reduce technical debt, automate repetitive tasks, use AI‑assisted engineering, and enhance developer experience.

Qualifications:

• Multi‑squad engineering leadership experience.
• Proven experience leading software engineering delivery in a complex, multi‑team environment.
• Experience providing technical leadership and governance across the full SDLC.
• Experience working in agile, product‑led delivery environments.
• Senior technical decision‑making: strong technical background in modern software engineering practices (APIs, integration, CI/CD, DevOps).
• Ability to guide architectural and design decisions and manage non‑functional requirements.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Degree in Computer Science / Engineering or equivalent professional experience.

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.

Core Behaviours:

• Take Ownership.
• Work as One Team.
• Develop a Growth Mindset.
• Strive to Innovate.
• Champion Customers.

AI / Digital Fluency Skills:

• Ability to design, integrate and operate AI enabled solutions within enterprise environments, including prompt driven workflows, retrieval augmented systems and AI agents.
• Applying 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 to deployment and continuous improvement.