At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead technical design and modernise legacy systems for a dynamic financial services environment.
- Company: M&G, a trusted name in savings and investments with over 175 years of innovation.
- Benefits: Enjoy 38 days annual leave, flexible working, and a valuable pension scheme up to 18%.
- Other info: Join a diverse team committed to inclusivity and professional growth.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by driving technical excellence and fostering a culture of continuous learning.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in technical leadership and modern programming languages.
The predicted salary is between 72000 - 88000 £ per year.
At M&G, our purpose is to give everyone real confidence to put their money to work. With a heritage dating back more than 175 years, we have a long history of innovation in savings and investments, combining asset management and insurance expertise to offer a wide range of solutions. Our two distinct operating segments, Asset Management and Life, work together to provide access to balanced, long-term investment and savings solutions.
The Technical Lead provides brown-field and green-field technical leadership across key areas of the M&G IT estate. In this role, you will be accountable for replacing unsafe, fragile, or costly legacy systems with modern, secure, and supportable solutions. You will define technical architecture patterns, set engineering standards, unblock delivery squads, and ensure smooth, robust operational handovers to run teams. Acting as the key design authority for your domain, you will bridge the gap between business strategy, solution architecture, and day-to-day engineering execution, driving continuous improvement in system reliability, cost efficiency, and developer productivity.
Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities
- Technology Ownership & Strategy: Act as the accountable technical design authority across an agreed estate domain. Proactively monitor estate health, focusing on operability, security posture, cost optimisation, and technical debt reduction. Partner with Product Owners, Solution Architects, and Delivery Leads to translate business capabilities into pragmatic technical roadmaps.
- Solution & Technical Design: Drive end-to-end technical designs from inception through to delivery, ensuring non-functional requirements (scalability, security, resilience, observability) are embedded by default. Prepare, submit, and champion design proposals through M&G engineering and governance forums to achieve first-time approval. Define and maintain proportionate system architecture and interface documentation.
- Engineering Standards, Patterns & Enablement: Establish, adopt, and enforce reusable engineering patterns, coding standards, CI/CD pipelines, and automation practices across feature squads. Identify and eliminate engineering impediments, improving delivery flow and reducing cycle times across teams. Ensure clear technical boundaries, discouraging single-person dependencies and siloed architectures.
- Technical Debt, Reliability & Production Support: Maintain an active technical debt backlog, collaborating with delivery management to balance feature delivery with platform modernisation and risk reduction. Champion observability, automated alerting, and defensive design to eliminate recurring incidents. Serve as an escalation authority for complex production defects and lead technical Root Cause Analysis investigations to feed preventative measures back into system design.
- Governance & Risk Management: Ensure strict adherence to the M&G Software Development Lifecycle and LEAF delivery controls. Drive threat modelling, data privacy, and regulatory compliance standards across owned systems.
- People Leadership & Community: Coach, mentor, and upskill software engineers across squads, fostering a culture of continuous learning, psychological safety, and technical excellence. Participate actively in technical hiring, onboarding, and capability assessment. Contribute to cross-hub engineering guilds and shared technology initiatives.
Key Knowledge, Skills & Experience
Essential Experience: Proven track record leading technical design and engineering delivery in complex enterprise or financial services environments. Deep experience modernising brown-field legacy platforms into contemporary, API-driven, cloud, or microservices architectures. Demonstrated experience guiding solutions through formal architecture and engineering governance boards. Strong hands-on background in modern programming languages, integration patterns. Practical experience establishing CI/CD automation, testing frameworks, and observability stacks. Experience in one or more of - Software development (frontend, backend, mobile), Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud, OpenShift, Cloud Apigee, Sonata, Azure Integration Services, Azure Data Factory, GitHub. Excellent stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate technical risk and trade-offs to non-technical business partners.
Desirable Experience: Experience in regulated financial services, wealth, asset management, or life & pensions platforms. Experience with enterprise integration technologies, batch/message transformation frameworks, or core customer platforms (e.g., Salesforce, document rendering pipelines, API gateways). Relevant cloud or architecture certifications.
Core Competencies & Behaviours
- Strategic & Pragmatic: Balances long-term target architecture with short-term commercial and delivery realities.
- Decisive & Accountable: Comfortable taking ownership of complex technical challenges and driving decisions forward.
- Collaborative Influencer: Builds credibility through expertise, coaching, and empathy rather than hierarchical authority.
- Quality & Safety Mindset: Uncompromising on security, stability, resilience, and operational excellence.
What we offer: We’re dedicated to supporting your wellbeing and helping you thrive, both at work and beyond. Our benefits are designed to help you balance your professional and personal life, and financially plan for the future. Our UK benefits include: A valuable pension scheme of up to 18%. Access to our Share Save and Share Incentive Plan, alongside financial wellbeing and support services. Enjoy 38 days annual leave (including bank holidays), with the opportunity to purchase up to five extra days. Our Time Off When You Need It policy gives you the flexibility to balance work and personal commitments. Our market-leading Inspiring Families policy includes comprehensive support and paid parental leave covering maternity, adoption, surrogacy, and paternity leave. Health & Protection cover includes Private Healthcare, Critical Illness cover and Life Assurance for you, with additional family options.
At M&G we strive to have a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture, underpinned by our policies and employee-led networks that offer networking, support and development opportunities for the diverse communities our colleagues represent. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds – across gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation and more – including neurodivergent individuals, career returners and those with military service experience. M&G is proud to be Level 3: Disability Confident Leader under the UK Government Disability Confident employer scheme, and we welcome applications from candidates with disabilities and long-term health conditions. We are committed to providing an inclusive recruitment process. All candidates have the opportunity to request reasonable adjustments when applying.
Life Technology - Technical Lead in Stirling employer: M&G plc
M&G plc is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that prioritises professional growth and development. As a Strategic Adviser Relationships Specialist, you will benefit from comprehensive training programmes and the chance to engage with a diverse range of financial products, all while working in a supportive team environment that values innovation and collaboration.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Life Technology - Technical Lead in Stirling
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at M&G plc or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to M&G plc.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like M&G plc.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like M&G plc that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Life Technology - Technical Lead in Stirling
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 M&G plc.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at M&G plc 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 M&G plc
✨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 M&G plc 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.
