Lead Software Engineer

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll be part of a small, cross-functional team that typically includes a Tech Lead, Product Designer, Product Manager, and 4–5 software engineers. You will benefit from the support of the Group Engineering Manager who oversees delivery, people, and processes across the group, an Architect who provides technical direction at the product level, and a coaching function to help you get unblocked.

This role is for a team working on building the next generation of AI capabilities particularly targeted towards database administration. This involves both developing new interfaces and approaches that address the needs of database professionals in using agentic AI, and working with other teams across Redgate to bring capabilities from their tools into the workflow.

You will be hands-on, shaping the approach the team takes to solving the most complex engineering tasks. You will be responsible for the quality of engineering practices within the team and developing the skills of team members to support this. You will lead cross-team engineering initiatives and work with your architect to inform technical strategy.

A key part of the role is the elevation of the whole team, which includes mentoring, coaching, teaching, and sharing your expertise. You will collaborate closely with the rest of the team’s leadership to help set and enact the team’s goals.

Your work at Redgate:

• Work closely with the Tech Lead and wider team to translate business strategy into implementation.
• Be accountable for the quality of software design for the product team in which you are assigned, balancing technical debt against speed of delivery.
• Share technical decisions within the solution group, division, and team.
• Lead significant pieces of work including clarifying requirements, facilitating meetings, breaking tasks down, and checking in with other team members.
• Write and maintain high-quality software.
• Grow the skills of other software engineers to take engineering to the next level.
• Establish strong engineering practice and work to deliver the technical strategy.
• Regularly contribute to internal Level Up events to support growing and developing skills within the division.
• Work with the group architect to help inform technical strategy.
• Understand how the product or systems owned by your team solve customer problems and add value, prioritising engineering work based on its potential to provide value to customers.

Who you are:

• You have exposure in modern .NET/ C#, Python, and Typescript with expertise in at least one.
• You can design and build world-class scalable, resilient, and secure systems, considering trade-offs and future implications.
• You have a bias for simplicity and maintainability in the code you write and the products you build.
• You have evidence of leading complex pieces of work, including leading the collaboration with other teams.
• You are an excellent communicator, being able to distil complex technical decisions into clear rationale.
• You’re enthusiastic about engaging with customers as necessary to create a great product.
• You are driven by continuous improvement and foster a growth mindset within the team.
• You have evidence of supporting the professional development of other engineers through coaching, mentoring, and role modelling.

Desirable skills:

• Experience in some or all of the following areas would be an advantage: Cloud infrastructure (especially AWS), infrastructure as code, and service management.
• Prompt engineering.
• Experience building AI applications/features and iterating based on user feedback.
• Agentic application frameworks e.g. Semantic Kernel, Langchain, Langraph, Strands agents etc.
• Agentic coding best practices: Spec driven development.
• Implementing supporting knowledge bases, e.g. opening access to searchable third-party codebases.
• Implementing AI feedback loops, e.g. custom tests, linter, compilation etc.
• Experience with different AI coding tools e.g. Cursor, VSCode agents, Claude code, Codex etc.
• Experience developing servers and clients.
• Experience consuming existing servers and clients e.g. Claude desktop, cursor, etc.
• AI feedback loops, agent observability, and evaluation.
• Experience with semantic search and vector databases.
• Front-end development with Typescript, React, and/or Material UI.

What's in it for you?

Circa £70k to £85k subject to experience. Flexible-hybrid working model (1 day every two weeks).