Engineering Manager - 12 Month FTC

This is a Fixed Term Opportunity for 12 months covering parental leave. The Engineering Manager will lead and nurture a squad of 6-8 engineers. You will be accountable for guiding your team through the entire lifecycle of building and maintaining our systems and products. As an experienced technical leader, you will ensure your squad possesses the necessary technical depth and skills to consistently deliver high-quality solutions. This involves hands-on engagement in key client projects, where you will lead by example and meticulously assess the technical quality of the team's output.

A core aspect of this role is fostering a thriving team environment. You will cultivate a culture of open feedback, providing actionable insights to empower team members in their continuous learning, growth, and development. Your leadership will create a safe space where engineers feel supported, comfortable admitting mistakes, and confident in learning from every experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop strong client relationships as the primary technical contact for new and existing clients.
• You are the primary technical contact for a subset of your team's clients, developing their technical vision, and working with your team to develop solutions.
• Provide senior oversight and direction to the technical approach on all projects within your squad, either directly or by working with the project lead developers.
• Champion our agile delivery model and provide support to teams to ensure that projects deliver on time and on budget without compromising quality.
• Work in partnership with the sector teams to identify opportunities to work with new and existing clients to provide consultancy services, enhancing the agency's positioning as a strategic partner.
• Advise your clients on overall technical strategy based on experience, industry trends and best practice, with the ability to challenge client thinking where appropriate.
• Work confidently with senior client stakeholders, acting as a trusted advisor and expert.
• Work closely with the engineering team to produce technical solutions for clients.
• Manage the technical and support relationships with clients in your team.
• Ensure your clients are supported with the appropriate team members.
• Ensure there is redundancy in your support teams to allow for holiday or any out of hours exceptions to be covered.
• Ensure the smooth operation of any support boards helping to unblock technical team members and resolve issues.
• Escalate high priority issues with the wider team to ensure that they are resolved in a timely manner.
• Lead the delivery of high quality software solutions on time and to budget.
• Ensure your project team members are fully engaged and participating in all aspects of the project and its administration during the build phase.
• Ensure all ceremonies of your Agile project are undertaken at the right time with the right people always present, including: standups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, code reviews and retrospectives.
• Ensure your team delivers the work they have committed to for the agreed deadline.
• Ensure your team is delivering work to meet or exceed the client expectations of quality.
• Ensure your team is delivering work that meets the tech studio's expectations of quality and adheres to our standards.
• Ensure your team is collaborating well at all times, problems are discussed early and raised to the delivery team and client as soon as possible.
• Develop and lead an effective squad of between 6 and 8 software engineers, managing a subset of the technical studio.
• Build and maintain a strong, supportive squad of engineers.
• Coach, mentor, train and inspire members of the technology team and help them develop their skills.
• Successfully onboard new technical team members so they are effective in their roles.
• Take accountability for the quality of delivery to all the clients and work with your squad and wider delivery team to ensure all clients have the development support they need.
• Ensure that your squad is well utilised and meeting their billable targets.
• Join weekly meetings with the engineering director to discuss squad capacity, utilisation and to escalate any people or project concerns.
• Take accountability for the effectiveness of any contractors assigned to your squad.
• Provide professional development coaching to your reports and help them to develop and action a professional development plan.
• Understand and promote our company policies.
• Ensure all your direct reports are completing their administrative responsibilities within the squad (e.g. IT assessment is up-to-date) and holiday requests are booked sufficiently in advance and fully considered before approval.
• Ensure your reports are fulfilling their job role accountabilities to the best of their abilities and provide the appropriate feedback and encourage appropriate reflections to support any necessary change.
• Accurately assess performance for the purposes of impact scoring.
• Hold regular 1:1 meetings and keep good notes and actions.
• Ensure successful technical project delivery by leading technical oversight, including risk mitigation, issue identification and resolution for all client work assigned to your Engineering squad.
• Ensure all projects are properly supervised and scrutinised to ensure effective technical delivery using agreed processes.
• Identify issues and root causes that are affecting technical delivery on projects in your team.
• Intervene and facilitate or direct actions on projects to address technical issues, working closely with the technical and delivery leads, escalating issues to the engineering director when required.
• Ensure your team has adequate technical delivery risk awareness and mitigation in place on all projects.
• Proactively change any aspect of our technical approaches to ensure that we remain successful in the future as technologies and practices change.
• Raise significant technical project concerns to the engineering and/or technical directors.

About You

Professional knowledge and experience

• Proven track record of hands-on leadership with agile, cross-functional engineering teams, guiding them through the full development lifecycle.
• Demonstrated experience in client-facing technical leadership, adept at managing technical delivery, effectively mentoring and developing engineers, and proactively mitigating project risks.
• Commitment to continuous improvement, actively staying abreast of industry trends and best practices in front-end development and CMS technologies to continuously enhance technical approaches and elevate team capabilities.
• Exceptional proficiency in software architecture and development, with a particular emphasis on CMS architectures and CMS platform integrations.

Technical skills

• You are an experienced Fullstack developer with exceptional proficiency in PHP-based CMSes, such as Drupal, and Frontend technologies, including React/Next.js, GraphQL and Storybook.
• You are comfortable working with both monolithic and decoupled architectures.
• You are familiar with the component-based approach to build and deliver projects.
• You apply strong knowledge of software architecture and design patterns to inform technical decisions, ensuring the delivery of resilient and maintainable systems.
• You lead and champion agile development practices, ensuring your team leverages tools like Jira and Confluence to optimize workflows and collaboration.
• Fostering a culture of quality through robust code review processes and enforcing high coding standards across the team.
• Providing strategic guidance in troubleshooting complex technical issues, effectively navigating challenges that span both front-end and back-end systems.
• Ensuring the team's proficiency in version control systems, especially Git, to maintain code integrity and collaborative development.

About Us

Manifesto is the digital experience agency for changemakers. We are committed to delivering purposeful and positive impact for people, planet and society, in restless pursuit of a better world. We take pride in creating award-winning digital experiences, products and services that are measurably ethical, inclusive, accessible, sustainable and joyful. Our changemaker clients include UNICEF UK, Breast Cancer Now, The Trussell Trust, Woodgreen, The Royal Academy of Arts, Zoological Society London, Historic Environment Scotland and Fauna & Flora. Part of the TPXimpact group - a Certified B Corporation, we are a team of 130 digital product leaders, creative designers, user experience designers, engagement specialists, software engineers and experience strategists. We are committed to having a positive impact on the clients and the communities we serve. We actively encourage applications from all genders, ethnicities, disabled people, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Don’t meet 100% of the criteria? We still want to hear from you. Please let us know if you require any adjustments during the recruitment process.