Software Engineer Tech Lead in Bristol

Job Summary: The Technical Lead is responsible for setting the technical direction, ensuring engineering excellence, and guiding development teams in delivering secure, scalable, high‐quality software products. This role combines architectural ownership, hands‐on technical leadership, and people development to drive consistent engineering standards across the organisation. The Technical Lead acts as the authority on technical decisions and owns the long‐term technical roadmap.

Job Description: As the Technical Lead, you will be responsible for setting the technical direction, ensuring engineering excellence, and guiding development teams in delivering secure, scalable, high‐quality software products. This role combines architectural ownership, hands‐on technical leadership, and people development to drive consistent engineering standards across the organisation. You will act as the authority on technical decisions and own the long‐term technical roadmap. This is a hybrid role based in Bristol.

• Responsibilities

• Technical Architecture

• Define, document, and maintain the overarching technical architecture across all products.
• Evaluate and recommend technology choices aligned with business goals and long‐term scalability.
• Ensure architectural consistency, interoperability, and adherence to best practices across teams.
• Establish and maintain design patterns, coding standards, and architectural guidelines.

• Security & Quality

• Lead security architecture, including vulnerability remediation strategies and secure‐by‐design principles.
• Define and enforce code review standards, practices, and quality gates.
• Establish quality metrics, measurement frameworks, and continuous improvement cycles.
• Provide guidance on performance optimisation, scalability strategies, and system reliability.

• DevOps & Automation

• Architect and evolve CI/CD pipelines to support efficient, reliable delivery.
• Define standards for test automation frameworks and ensure adoption across teams.
• Champion infrastructure‐as‐code practices and modern deployment automation.
• Oversee deployment, release management, and environment strategy.

• AI Strategy & Tooling

• Lead the adoption and effective use of the organisation’s AI‐assisted development tool-chain across all engineering teams.
• Define best practices, standards, and guardrails for AI‐assisted development, including code generation, automated code review, and intelligent testing.
• Establish policies for responsible AI use within engineering workflows, aligned with organisational governance frameworks (e.g. ISO/IEC 42001).
• Drive measurable productivity improvements through consistent, disciplined use of AI tooling.
• Champion AI literacy and up-skilling across development teams, ensuring capability keeps pace with tooling.

• People & Team Development

• Provide technical mentoring, coaching, and support for developers at all levels.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing, engineering communities of practice, and cross‐team collaboration.
• Identify skills gaps, training needs, and development opportunities within engineering teams.
• Support technical hiring, including interviews, assessments, and on-boarding.
• Guide career development for technical staff, helping shape progression pathways.

• Decision Authority

• Hold decision‐making authority on technical architecture and design.
• Enforce coding standards, quality expectations, and engineering best practices.
• Mandate technical practices such as test coverage thresholds, documentation standards, and review processes.
• Own the technical roadmap, including technical debt prioritisation and long‐term platform evolution.

• Other Duties

• Assist in ad‐hoc projects.
• Travel to Company sites (Northampton and Bristol) and for events as required.
• Any other duties assigned by your line manager.

• Skills and Experience

• Essential

• Proven experience in a senior engineering or technical leadership role.
• Strong background in software architecture, system design, and modern engineering practices.
• Deep understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, cloud platforms, and automation tooling.
• Expertise in secure coding, performance optimisation, and scalable system design.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor, influence, and lead technical teams.
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate complex technical concepts for diverse audiences.
• Proven ability to lead adoption of AI‐assisted development practices, embedding best practice and driving consistent usage across engineering teams.
• Hands‐on experience with AI‐powered development tools and a clear understanding of their effective and responsible use in professional software delivery.
• C#/Java and Azure.

• Desirable

• Experience working in multi‐product or platform‐based environments.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks, security standards, or regulated industries.
• Exposure to agile delivery models and cross‐functional team leadership.
• Experience defining AI governance policies aligned with frameworks such as ISO/IEC 42001.
• Track record of driving measurable productivity gains through AI tooling in CI/CD and development workflows.
• Strong prompt engineering skills and practical understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations in a software engineering context.