Engineer team lead

The Opportunity: This is an opportunity to join IRIS Software Group as we transform into an AI-first company delivering cloud-native solutions that impact millions of lives globally. IRIS produces an integrated suite of mission-critical software applications spanning accountancy, HR, payroll, education, and business operations. You will be working as part of an Agile team to deliver innovative solutions to user stories and requirements, contributing to our modernisation journey that serves over 100,000 customers across 135 countries.

The role is challenging and dynamic, with key deadlines to be met as we accelerate our cloud transformation and implement next-generation technologies. You’ll need to embrace continuous learning and bring a focused attitude to tasks that directly enable businesses, schools, and organisations to work smarter and more efficiently.

You will be supported in your career growth by a highly experienced team, comprehensive learning opportunities, and a vibrant technical community committed to creating exceptional solutions that make a real difference in how our customers operate and succeed.

The Engineering Lead is a hybrid leadership role that combines technical leadership, agile delivery ownership, and people management. You will lead an autonomous engineering team building modern full-stack web applications using the latest UI frameworks, .NET Core backends, and cloud-native technologies, ensuring both delivery excellence and team development while remaining technically hands-on with containerised, scalable solutions.

• Ensure projects are scoped, prioritised, and delivered on time with clear alignment to business goals and quarterly OKRs.
• Drive predictability, velocity, and quality through effective agile practices and continuous improvement.
• Communicate proactively with stakeholders (product, design, leadership, customers) on delivery progress, risks, and dependencies.
• Own team’s Agile maturity, establish team delivery standards, and optimise team practices for maximum effectiveness and predictability.
• Balance workload, staffing, and hiring needs to maintain sustainable delivery while planning for growth.
• Establish and drive comprehensive quality culture including TDD/BDD practices, testing standards, automated quality gates, and team code review excellence.
• Define team security standards, ensure team compliance governance, and drive security-first culture within the engineering team.
• Define team documentation strategy, establish governance frameworks for the team, and ensure knowledge management within the engineering team.
• Line manage engineers including coaching, performance reviews, career planning, and regular 1:1s.
• Develop team members through structured career development, skill building, and succession planning.
• Handle performance management including improvement plans, conflict resolution, and team dynamics.

Frontend Strategy: Angular, React, Vue.js, Blazor; .NET Core, C#, ASP.NET Core Web APIs, REST, application architectures, and distributed systems.

Data Architecture: Strategic knowledge of SQL, NoSQL and data architecture decisions.

AI-Assisted Software Engineering: in engineering practices to accelerate design, development, testing and debugging. Using them critically and responsibly to improve quality, productivity and decision-making.

CI/CD Strategy: Define team CI/CD strategy, establish team governance frameworks, and ensure adoption of deployment best practices across the team.

Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, ARM Templates or AWS CloudFormation/CDK.

Observability Strategy: DataDog, Application Insights or Amazon CloudWatch implementation with comprehensive observability strategy and cloud governance.

Strategic SAAS using Azure (Functions, Queue, Blob Storage, VMs, etc.) or AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, EC2, etc.).

Docker and Kubernetes (AKS/EKS) with production-scale deployments.

Quality & Testing Leadership: Define team testing strategy, establish quality governance for the team, and measure team adoption with continuous improvement initiatives.

6+ years in software engineering, minimum 1 year of formal people management experience OR 2+ years of technical leadership with mentoring responsibilities.

Demonstrable experience delivering complex software projects using Agile methodologies.

Fostering collaboration, promoting team building and culture development skills.

Experience line managing engineers including 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development.

Experience with platform engineering or shared service teams building reusable UI components and backend services.

Experience designing high-quality AI interactions through effective prompt engineering, efficient token usage, and optimisation techniques, combined with practical use of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to integrate AI systems with tools and services for richer, automated workflows.

Expertise with advanced monitoring and APM strategies using DataDog, including custom dashboards and alerting.

Advanced understanding of modern UI architecture patterns (micro-frontends, SSR/SSG).

Experience as Engineering Lead, Tech Lead, or similar leadership role with full-stack teams.

Exposure to DevOps processes and automation ensuring end-to-end responsibility of features.

Advanced cloud certifications in Azure or AWS.

Internal: Engineering Teams, Engineering Directors, Product Owners/Managers, QA Teams, DevOps Teams, Platform Teams, Professional Services, Customer Support, Third-party vendors and partners.

Leadership: Engineering Director, VP Engineering, Product Leadership, Executive Team.

Technical Leadership: High team code quality, effective architecture decisions, reduced technical debt, improved scalability, and proactive tooling adoption.

Quality Excellence: Team adoption of automated TDD/BDD and code review practices with effective quality gates and measurable quality improvements.

Autonomous team with strong ownership, positive engagement scores, clear development objectives, low attrition, and active succession planning.