Lead Engineer (AI Native) in Manchester

About CreateFuture

CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference while always putting people first. We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years.

35 days leave (including bank holidays). Private medical insurance. Enhanced parental and adoption leave. 40 hours of paid learning and development. Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.

About the role and team:

This role is primarily a client facing role, focused both on solving client problems and AI native transformation of their own teams, however you will play a varied role across all elements of our business, from pre-sales through to marketing and thought leadership - you’re not afraid to lean in and contribute wherever an opportunity presents itself. You have excellent consulting skills - you love appropriately challenging the client context or requirements to lead them towards a better outcome. You care deeply about software craftsmanship, designing and building and shipping high-quality, maintainable systems and you use AI as a force multiplier to amplify your own impact and raise the bar for the teams you work with. You’ve got a real appreciation of operational, commercial and cultural impact of making changes to ways of working through the use of AI and you ensure safe and ethical applications and you enjoy helping simplify problems, make decisions, and have a bias to build and test over analysis paralysis, taking responsibility for overall outcomes, not just the implementation, and are influential. You’ve got a clear communications style, and love using your experience to help others succeed through mentoring and coaching.

What you’ll be doing:

• Work closely with client teams to understand their context, constraints, and goals, and help turn ambiguous problems into clear, workable approaches.
• Design and build software across different parts of a system, making pragmatic decisions that balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Use AI tools extensively and usefully throughout the delivery lifecycle to support research, context exploration, architecture, implementation, testing, and documentation, while ensuring decisions and changes are traceable and explainable.
• Build and coach quality from the start by applying AI to strong foundational techniques such as observability, verification and build automation.
• Help clients make deliberate AI-focused technology and tooling choices that avoid unnecessary lock-in and allow delivery approaches to evolve as cost, regulation, or capability changes.
• Share learning with both client teams and CreateFuture colleagues to improve delivery practices over time.
• Deliver external thought leadership at conferences and meetups to improve our brand presence and credibility.

We’d love to talk to you if you:

• Have significant experience building and maintaining production software and understands the core responsibilities and accountabilities that come with it, irrespective of AI.
• Have a core and demonstrably strong and recent skillset around common languages/stacks that are in use in production, for example within the Java, .NET or Web engineering ecosystems.
• Have experience of designing, building and operating software systems in at least one cloud hyperscaler.
• Feel confident and comfortable owning the underlying workload infrastructure for your domain boundary, making architecture decisions and engaging with platform and architecture functions.
• Whilst we don’t expect you to be an expert in design, product or delivery, you will have an appreciation and good general understanding of those disciplines - our belief is you will be able to accelerate outcomes with your T-shaped thinking and application of good general problem solving skills & AI to derive specific domain context.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and are happy working across multiple parts of a system rather than focusing on a single framework or layer.
• Use AI tools to scale execution, while remaining accountable for the outcomes they produce.
• Have a commercial mindset, solve pain points to drive business outcomes within client constraints and technology risk.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and relishes the opportunity to learn, explore and define.

What we’ll offer you:

We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.

Our hiring process

We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. Call with our Talent Acquisition Team Role specific capability interview Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.

Inclusion at CreateFuture

We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. We look forward to your application!