At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead engineering teams to deliver innovative, high-quality products using modern practices and AI.
- Company: Join The Citation Group, a dynamic collective supporting SMEs across essential services.
- Benefits: Enjoy 25 days holiday, birthday off, healthcare plan, and family support perks.
- Other info: Hybrid work model with opportunities for career growth and continuous improvement.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in a fast-growing company while shaping the future of technology.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in leading software teams and strong technical skills in modern engineering.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 75000 £ per year.
Location: Hybrid – 3 days office (Wilmslow HQ), 2 days from home
Salary: Competitive
We are The Citation Group - a collective of businesses dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized enterprises across a range of essential services. Our mission is to ease these pressures by providing expertise, guidance, and solutions that enable business leaders to focus on what they do best.
The Role
- Lead multiple engineering teams to deliver secure, reliable, high-quality products at pace.
- Drive modern engineering practices, DevOps maturity and AI-enabled ways of working across both our products and software delivery processes.
- Work closely with Product, Design, Architects and Tech Leads to help shape technical direction, improve delivery effectiveness, and coach teams to build, ship and operate software successfully.
People Leadership
- Lead, coach, and support multiple cross-functional engineering teams and tech leads.
- Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Run regular 1:1s, provide clear feedback and support career development and performance management.
- Grow leadership capability within teams so decisions can be made effectively at the right level.
- Support hiring, onboarding and retention to build diverse, high-performing teams.
Technical Leadership and Engineering Excellence
- Provide technical leadership without becoming a bottleneck, enabling strong engineering decisions across teams.
- Champion modern engineering practices including TDD/BDD, Clean Code, pair, and mob programming.
- Automated testing across unit, integration, end-to-end and performance levels.
- Secure SDLC practices from design through deployment.
- Work with architects and senior engineers to evolve robust, observable, secure and cost-effective cloud-native architectures.
- Maintain a strong understanding of technologies including .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP, and related frameworks, JavaScript/TypeScript, React and modern front-end development, Relational and NoSQL databases.
AI, Automation and Innovation
- Drive adoption of AI and automation within engineering workflows and product capabilities.
- Identify opportunities where AI can improve quality, reduce manual effort or enable new customer value.
- Lead effective adoption of AI/agentic coding assistants across coding, testing, documentation and operational workflows.
- Ensure AI usage aligns with security, privacy and compliance standards.
- Run lightweight experiments and spikes to validate AI use cases and measure impact.
- Collaborate with internal or external AI/ML specialists and vendors to integrate AI services into products and platforms.
- Support the full lifecycle of AI-enabled features from prototype through to production monitoring and operation.
Delivery and Stakeholder Management
- Partner with Product Managers and Product Owners to define outcomes, priorities, roadmaps and delivery plans.
- Ensure teams deliver small, frequent, high-quality increments and manage dependencies proactively.
- Communicate clearly with stakeholders on priorities, risks, trade-offs and delivery scope.
- Contribute to cross-team planning, portfolio alignment, and architectural review activities.
Process, Quality and Continuous Improvement
- Continuously improve team ways of working, agile delivery practices and operational processes.
- Establish clear standards for testing, release management, resilience and non-functional requirements.
- Use metrics and team feedback to improve delivery flow, reliability, stability and team health.
- Improve cross-team coordination around technical debt, releases, environments and operational change.
About you
Leadership and Management
- Significant experience leading software engineering teams delivering production systems.
- Experience managing multiple teams or complex product-focused engineering organisations.
- Proven ability to develop engineers and tech leads, manage performance effectively and improve team health.
Technical
- Strong background in modern software engineering, including experience with .NET / .NET Core, Java, PHP and related frameworks, JavaScript/TypeScript, React and modern front-end technologies, Relational and/or NoSQL databases.
- Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing, Cloud platforms such as Azure and/or AWS, Containers and infrastructure-as-code tools including Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform or Ansible, Monitoring, logging and performance analysis tooling.
AI and Automation
- Practical experience using and rolling out AI/agentic coding assistants in engineering teams.
- Experience designing, integrating or operating AI-enabled product features.
- Ability to evaluate AI tools and approaches pragmatically across value, risk, cost and compliance considerations.
Behavioural
- Excellent communication skills across technical and business audiences.
- Strong problem-solving and decision-making capability in complex environments.
- Collaborative, low-ego approach with strong cross-functional partnership skills.
- Strong ownership mindset with a focus on delivering measurable outcomes.
Nice to Have
- Experience in B2B SaaS and/or domains relevant to Citation including HR, Health & Safety, Certification, background screening or eLearning.
- Experience working across multiple business units or product portfolios.
- Experience leading distributed or remote teams.
- Previous exposure to ML/AI-focused engineering leadership environments.
Here's a taste of the perks we roll out for our extraordinary team members:
- 25 Days of Holiday + 8 Bank Holidays: Take your well-deserved break with 25 days of holiday, plus those cherished bank holidays.
- Birthday Bliss: Enjoy your birthday in style with a day off.
- Post-Wedding Bliss: Extra weeks of holiday for newlyweds.
- Growing Families: Vouchers and special perks await to celebrate the newest addition to your family.
- Healthcare cash plan: We offer private healthcare to ensure your peace of mind and keep you feeling your best.
Engineering Manager in Wilmslow employer: LinkedIn
At The Citation Group, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer that fosters a collaborative and innovative work culture. Our hybrid working model allows for flexibility while our commitment to employee growth is evident through comprehensive training and development opportunities. With competitive benefits including generous holiday allowances, healthcare plans, and unique perks like birthday and post-wedding leave, we ensure our team members feel valued and supported in both their professional and personal lives.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Engineering Manager in Wilmslow
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We think you need these skills to ace Engineering Manager in Wilmslow
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at LinkedIn.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at LinkedIn and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at LinkedIn
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If LinkedIn uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
