Software Engineering Team Manager in Vauxhall

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a small team of software engineers on the Enterprise Learning & Skills (ELS) engineering team. The team builds, scales, and evolves a large-scale, API-driven platform used globally to issue and verify digital credentials.

This is a people- and delivery-focused leadership role: you'll own the day-to-day health, output, and growth of the team, ensuring work stays on track, meets our standards for quality and consistency, and delivers what the organization and our customers expect. You'll allocate and prioritize daily work, clear blockers, clarify requirements, and give real-time feedback so engineers can do their best work. You'll be the first line of support when coding or system issues surface, deciding what the team can resolve and what needs to be escalated to senior engineering leadership. You'll also own onboarding and skill development for new team members, and you'll partner closely with Product, Customer Success, and external vendors to turn requirements into reliable, well-sequenced delivery.

You don't need to write production code, but you do need enough technical depth to guide design discussions, hold the team to strong engineering practices, and ask the right questions.

What You'll Do

• Lead, coach, and support a small team of engineers building Ruby on Rails services and React frontends, owning the team's well-being, performance, and immediate output.
• Plan and allocate daily and sprint work, monitor progress against delivery schedules, and keep projects on track through clear priorities and timely course corrections.
• Troubleshoot obstacles, clarify requirements, and coordinate handoffs across engineers, teams, and vendors so blockers are resolved quickly and together.
• Triage bugs and production issues with attention to detail, minimizing disruption to the customers who rely on our platform.
• Maintain standards of quality and consistency within our defined processes, including coding and QA standards, code review coverage, test thoroughness, and team documentation.
• Give real-time, constructive feedback; run regular 1:1s; and celebrate team milestones while openly recognizing individual contributions.
• Own the onboarding and skill development of new team members, reducing ramp-up time and onboarding errors.
• Identify and introduce process improvements at the team level, within defined limits, and escalate unresolved or higher-impact issues to senior engineering leadership in a timely way.
• Champion the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools for coding, testing, documentation, and debugging across the team.
• Uphold secure, ethical, and resilient engineering practices, including data and information security expectations, across everything the team ships.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of professional software development experience and 2+ years managing or formally leading a software engineering team.
• Working familiarity with our core stack (Ruby on Rails, React, AWS, PostgreSQL) and with API management, cloud computing, DevOps practices, and software design, with enough technical acumen to guide discussions and evaluate trade-offs.
• Proven track record of running a team's daily delivery reliably: consistent adherence to coding and QA standards, accurate and timely task completion, and dependable schedules.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with a habit of identifying challenges early, evaluating options, and driving practical resolutions.
• Exceptional collaboration and communication, equally effective with engineers, non-technical stakeholders, and external vendors.
• Experience onboarding and developing engineers, with evidence of shortened ramp-up times and growing team capability.
• Sound judgment about when to resolve issues locally and when to escalate, and a record of escalating clearly and promptly.
• Adaptability and a commitment to continuous learning as the team, platform, and tooling evolve.
• Strong understanding of information and data security fundamentals and an ethical, customer-centric approach to decisions.

AI-Native Expectations

You should be comfortable using AI tools in your own work and confident guiding a team that uses them for coding, testing, documentation, and learning. You'll set expectations for how AI-generated output is validated, help the team build sound judgment about when to rely on it and when not to, and stay curious about how AI agents and automated AI can responsibly improve productivity and quality across the team.

How Success Is Measured

High performers in this role are recognized by their team's consistent adherence to coding and QA standards, the speed and accuracy of task completion, and the reliability of daily delivery schedules. Timely escalation of unresolved issues, high coverage on code review, and the successful introduction of team-level process improvements are central to success. The readiness of new staff, evidenced by reduced ramp-up times and fewer onboarding errors, also features in performance assessment.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on background as a Rails, React, or full-stack engineer before moving into management.
• Experience designing, deploying, or operating production workloads on AWS and Azure, and familiarity with CI/CD and automated deployment practices.
• Experience managing work delivered in partnership with third-party or vendor teams.
• Experience with resilience planning, incident management, or on-call processes for customer-facing systems.
• Experience with distributed or service-oriented systems and asynchronous, event-driven communication between services.
• Experience introducing AI agents or automated AI tooling into an engineering team's workflow.