Engineering Lead

Are you looking for an Engineering Lead role in a fast-growing business where people are at the heart of everything we do? Would you like to work within a socially conscious organisation that is making a real impact in the education sector?

The Key is the country’s most trusted provider of knowledge and know-how to education leaders determined to make a difference. We provide authoritative, up-to-the-minute sector intelligence, tools, services and resources that give leaders the knowledge to act.

We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Engineering Lead to join our Engineering team. As an Engineering Lead, you will run one of the product squads building The Key’s compliance suite (part of Key Group, alongside GovernorHub and Robin). It is a player-coach role, combining technical leadership and line management of a small squad of 2–3 engineers.

You will:

• Code regularly alongside the squad, setting the quality bar through your own work and code review.
• Own the architecture of the squad’s apps and services, including long-term codebase health and safe operability after launch.
• Act as the squad’s Tech Lead under the Product Operating Model: a peer in weekly discovery, with feasibility sign-off on product briefs before work enters the sprint board.
• Ship tested working code to main every sprint; launch on the termly cadence.
• Join customer conversations often enough to stay in direct contact with the problem.
• Line-manage the squad: regular 1-2-1s, development plans, and honest performance conversations.
• Build an engaged, sustainable squad culture as part of the engineering leadership group.
• Work agentic-first as your default mode and drive adoption across the squad.
• Contribute to shared agentic practice across the engineering organisation (skills, tooling, codebase AI-health).
• Coordinate with the other squad leads, the Staff Engineer, and the Platform and Core squads on shared services and dependencies.
• Consume shared AI services rather than rebuilding them, flagging cross-squad constraints early.

The ideal person:

• Hands-on seniority: a senior engineer who still ships, with strong recent experience of modern web stacks (we use TypeScript/React/Node and Python).
• AI-native practice: daily, enthusiastic use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar) and a track record of raising others’ AI-assisted practice.
• Technical leadership: proven leadership of a team (tech lead, lead engineer, or manager of a small team), including architectural ownership and mentoring.
• Product partnership: comfortable in discovery, trading scope with product peers, and offering alternatives rather than blockers.
• People management: line management experience, or clear readiness for it with support.
• Communication: excellent written and spoken English, for product peers and engineers alike.

Desirable:

• LLM products: experience building LLM-powered product features.
• Domain: SaaS, EdTech, or compliance experience.
• Environment: comfort with small-company pace and legacy code alongside greenfield work.

If you don’t meet all of the above but have a genuine interest in joining our team please get in touch - we’d be very happy to chat.

Benefits:

We place huge importance on caring for and developing our people. If you join us you can expect a good work-life balance and the training and support you need to succeed in your role and continue to progress. We are a socially conscious company, but one that also likes to have fun. We offer a generous holiday allowance, flexible hours, buying and selling holiday, enhanced maternity pay, free breakfast, fruit, and drinks, regular socials and much more.

How to apply:

Please upload your CV [and covering letter] below. In your cover letter please explain why you think you would be right for this role, how your experience fits, and why you would like to work at The Key. The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 9th September. If you have any questions please email recruitment@thekeysupport.com.