Business Applications Technical Lead in Newcastle upon Tyne

Based in Northeast of England - Up to £90k plus car or car allowance, plus bonus, pension, healthcare. Hybrid Role.

Technical leadership, SFIA level 5 equivalent. Right across infrastructure, there’s a requirement to not only maintain, but also renew and reimagine. Whatever stage you’re at in your career, with us you’ll have an opportunity to grow and develop. Delivering essential infrastructure services for life, while being safety first, and client and customer centric in a friendly, fun and respectful environment where you are encouraged to thrive.

Essential skills & experience

• Strong technical understanding of business platforms such as Jitterbit, IFS, IMS or similar
• Solid experience with enterprise integration patterns, API design, asynchronous messaging and data synchronisation
• Proven experience providing technical leadership across onshore and offshore teams, including line management responsibility
• Track record of improving engineering quality, release readiness and handover into live service
• Strong ability to review designs, identify risks and ensure solutions meet clear quality standards
• Good understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, secure design and modern delivery practices
• Experience working in blended delivery environments including permanent teams, contractors and System Integrators
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at different levels

Desirable experience

• Experience working on large‑scale enterprise programmes or platform transformations
• Broad understanding of architecture across data, mobile and security domains
• Familiarity with ITIL‑aligned operating models or service transition practices

Core responsibilities

• Define and maintain engineering standards, patterns and guardrails across business platforms, ensuring consistency in how solutions are designed and delivered
• Review and assure solution designs, identifying risks, poor practices or gaps, and supporting better decisions before build begins
• Assess delivery quality and readiness, ensuring solutions are maintainable, testable and prepared for smooth transition into live service
• Provide technical leadership across mixed delivery teams, acting as an escalation point and guiding engineering quality through influence and clarity
• Support release and transition readiness, ensuring documentation, knowledge transfer and support expectations are in place
• Work closely with engineering, product and operational teams to maintain alignment across design, build and ongoing support

As an organisation, there is little we don’t do and plenty to get involved in. Our Group Support roles are vital in making sure we can help over 11,000 people deliver essential infrastructure seamlessly across water, energy, transport and telecom. The Senior Technical Lead provides technical leadership across business platforms, helping ensure solutions are well designed, consistent, and ready for long‑term use. Alongside this, the role includes a small amount of line management for UK‑based team members. This is not a hands‑on coding role. Instead, you will define and guide how engineering work is done—setting standards, shaping patterns, and acting as a clear escalation point for both onshore and offshore delivery teams. You will work closely with delivery teams and partners to make sure solutions are built in the right way from the start—aligned to agreed standards, easy to support, and fit for live service. Your focus is on improving quality, consistency, and confidence in delivery.

What will you be doing?

You will define and maintain the standards that guide how solutions are built across business platforms. This includes setting clear expectations for configuration, customisation, integration, and API usage, as well as ensuring delivery outputs meet agreed standards for documentation, testing and handover into live service. You will review solution designs at key stages, making sure they align with architecture, meet business needs, and avoid unnecessary complexity or risk. Where issues arise, you’ll challenge constructively, highlight technical debt, and ensure decisions are made with the long term in mind. Working across delivery teams, you’ll assess the quality and readiness of what’s being built—ensuring solutions are not only working, but are maintainable, testable and ready to be supported in live environments. You’ll play a key role in release readiness, making sure the right documentation, knowledge transfer and support expectations are in place. You’ll also work closely with other senior engineering leaders, as well as Product, Business Analysis, QA, Security and Operations teams, helping ensure alignment across the full delivery lifecycle—from build through to run.

What’s in it for you?

• Matched or contributory pension scheme
• Online GP service, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• Employee assistance programme
• My Rewards portal, access to 1000’s of retail discounts
• Life assurance
• Cycle to work, salary finance and give as you earn schemes
• Enhanced maternity, paternity leave and adoption leave
• Reward and recognition scheme
• Company car (or allowance) and fuel card with a range of EV and hybrid vehicles to choose from
• My Car Choice salary sacrifice EV/ Hybrid car scheme
• Private health care and health care cash plan for you (and your family)
• Discretionary bonus scheme
• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Recommend a friend – get rewarded for introducing people to us!

We are committed to ensuring that all job applicants are treated equally, without discrimination because of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age.