Engineering Enablement Lead – AI and Delivery in London

The NRLA: Who we are

The UK's largest membership organisation for private residential landlords, the National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) supports and represents more than 100,000 members across England and Wales. Created by landlords, for landlords, it offers investors everything they need to run a successful and compliant lettings business, whether they are full-time property professionals running large portfolios or accidental landlords with a single let. The NRLA is a trusted ally, on hand to guide members through the complex regulatory environment, with all the essential documents and guidance needed to run a successful and fully compliant business.

A truly member-first organisation, innovation is at the heart of what we do and have invested in and developed new proptech solutions for members, including the acquisition of property safety certification firm Safe2 and the development of property management system Portfolio. A dynamic and fast-paced organisation, the NRLA is a great place to work, and it is not just us saying that, we have Investors in People Gold status to prove it. The association was also named one of the best companies to work for in the UK in a list compiled by The Sunday Times.

Our enthusiastic and ambitious staff work out of offices in Central Manchester and Central London with hybrid working options available. Colleagues typically work from home four days a week with one day in the office. We are looking for colleagues who are professional, adaptable, and innovative. In return we offer an inclusive and creative working environment with attractive options for training and career development and a competitive salary and benefits package.

The NRLA package:

• 25 days annual leave increasing to 26 days with three years' service, 27 days with five years' service and 28 days with seven years' service
• Additional annual day off for your birthday
• Salary exchange Pension scheme
• Life assurance
• Cash plan health and wellbeing benefit including Employee Assistance Programme and counselling service
• Sick pay
• Cycle purchase loans, season tickets loans and interest-free staff loans
• Complimentary NRLA membership
• Non-contractual annual performance-related bonus scheme
• Enhanced maternity and paternity pay

Location: London - Hybrid

Key Working Relationships:

• Developers and QA specialists in every NRLA development team, including teams that join through acquisition from the date they transfer.
• Head of Product Development, who owns the four key delivery metrics this role exists to move.
• DevOps Manager, who owns the cloud platform, environments and runners the pipelines depend on.
• Chief Technology Officer, as Data Protection Manager, for the data-handling terms of AI tools.
• Product Directorate and Business Analysts, for documenting the domain knowledge that AI tools need.

Main Purpose and Scope of Job:

Increase the throughput and reliability of the NRLA development function by building the engineering platform that lets every team deliver small changes safely and often: AI-assisted development with clear guardrails, automated testing at every level and continuous integration and deployment pipelines for every product. The role is an enabling role in the Team Topologies sense. It does not deliver features and it does not take work off teams indefinitely. It works alongside each team for a defined period, builds the capability with them, hands it over and moves on. Success is measured by the four key delivery metrics moving per product, by the review queue shrinking and by teams owning the practices without further help.

Duties and Key Responsibilities

AI-Assisted Development:

• Own and maintain the AI-assisted development working agreement: approved tools, what may be shared, review expectations and how agent context is documented. Review it quarterly with the team.
• Evaluate AI coding, review and testing tools against NRLA needs, run time-boxed trials, and recommend what to adopt, what to drop and what the budget should be.
• Design the agent context files, prompts and workflows for each repository with the team that owns it, and keep them in version control alongside the code.
• Work with Product and the BAs to get the domain knowledge that AI tools depend on out of people's heads and into documentation that agents and new joiners can use.
• Coach developers and QA in prompting, supervising and evaluating AI-generated code, and in designing software that AI tools can work on safely.
• Measure the effect of AI tooling on the four key metrics and on quality, and report it to the Deputy Director monthly.

Test Automation:

• Design the test automation strategy for each product with its team: unit, integration, contract and end-to-end tests, and the test data management that lets them run reliably on every change.
• Build the first automated test suites and CI test stages with the team, then hand over ownership.
• Use AI tooling to generate and maintain tests where it is reliable, and say where it is not.
• Work with the QA specialists to move testing earlier in the development cycle and to reduce manual regression testing before release.
• Agree a definition of done that includes automated tests, and help teams meet it.
• Design and build the continuous integration and deployment pipelines for every NRLA product, so that each change is built, tested and scanned automatically and releasing to production is a merge or a single action.
• Agree with the DevOps Manager which environments, runners and infrastructure services the pipelines depend on, and who provides them.
• Build dependency scanning, secrets detection, licence checks and static analysis into the pipeline, and set the observability minimums (logging, monitoring, alerting, error-to-ticket flow) for each product.
• Remove the manual steps between a change being finished and being live, and measure the lead time that results.

Enablement and Handover:

• Work with one or two teams at a time for an agreed period, in the facilitating interaction mode, with a written statement of what capability the team will own at the end and a date.
• Run the standing AI and engineering practice slot at the fortnightly engineering community session.
• Support the integration of acquired development teams by bringing their codebases onto the same pipelines, test standards and AI working agreement from their first quarter.
• Document everything built so that no pipeline, test suite or tool depends on this role to keep running.

Delivery Performance:

• Help the Deputy Director baseline the four key delivery metrics per product in October 2026 and automate their collection from Git, CI and Jira.
• Analyse where time goes between a change being written and being live, and propose the improvements with the largest payback for each team.
• Protect the review queue: track pull request size and review turnaround, and work with teams to keep both within the agreed norms.

Security, Data Protection and Compliance:

• Apply NRLA’s information governance standards to every tool and pipeline, and raise data protection questions with the CTO before, not after, a tool is used.
• Comply with NRLA policy and statutory requirements, including data protection, information security, equality and diversity, health and safety and the code of conduct.

Person Specification

Qualifications:

• Degree in computer science, engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Cloud (GCP), DevOps or security certifications (desirable).

Skills and Abilities:

• Uses AI coding assistants and agentic tools well on real codebases, understands their limits, and can set guardrails others will follow.
• Designs and builds CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar) and automated test suites, and coaches developers to own them.
• Explains technical choices to developers, QA, product managers and senior leaders without line authority, and brings people with them.
• Works with one team at a time to a defined handover, resists becoming the permanent owner of what has been built, and documents as it goes.
• Measures the effect of a change rather than asserting it, and changes course when the data says so.

Experience:

• At least four years of professional software development, including hands-on CI/CD, test automation and DevOps work on production systems.
• Has introduced AI-assisted development tools into a team’s day-to-day work and can describe the results, including what did not work.
• Has built or substantially improved automated test coverage and deployment pipelines for an existing codebase.
• Experience with Angular, TypeScript, Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, or Laravel and PHP; experience across both stacks is desirable.
• Observability and security tooling in a pipeline (Sentry, OpenTelemetry, dependency and secrets scanning) (desirable).
• Coaching or enabling other developers as part of a previous role (desirable).

Knowledge:

• Modern software engineering practice: continuous delivery, trunk-based development, small batches, test automation and loosely coupled architecture.
• The four key delivery metrics and the Accelerate capabilities, and how an enabling team works in Team Topologies.
• Current AI development tools and agent frameworks, how to document context for them, and the data, licensing and quality risks they carry.
• UK GDPR and data protection by design as they apply to development tooling and test data.

Personal Attributes and Other Requirements:

• Hands on, and happy to pair with developers at every level.
• Curious about new tools and disciplined about adopting them.
• Patient with teams that move at different speeds, and clear about why the pace is set where it is.
• Takes ownership of outcomes, not of territory.