Senior software engineer and team lead in Bristol

This job is with WTW, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. As our Engineering Lead, you'll drive the platforms and tooling that help teams deliver faster, safer, and smarter. Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently... our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances. Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations - the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers - balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability Champion automated testing, observability, and production readiness for backend services - PHPUnit, Go tests, Datadog, and safe release practices Oversee database and schema evolution practices - migrations, data integrity, and performance - in partnership with platform and infrastructure teams Lead incident response for backend-owned systems - triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, Security, Performance and Optimisation - raising the bar through design review and hands-on contribution when needed Support production readiness for high-risk changes - coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross-team dependencies at the legacy/modern boundary Support hiring and help raise the bar for engineering talent Expertise in championing engineering best practices while balancing speed, quality, and operational stability Skill in reviewing and contributing to technical designs that meet quality and security standards Proven experience as a team lead or technical lead in fast-growing, regulated environments (fintech, pensions, banking, or insurance) Deep expertise in at least one engineering discipline relevant to your squad - backend, frontend, mobile, quality, or platform operations - with solid breadth across design, build, test, and run Track record of owning production systems end-to-end: implementation, rollout, monitoring, incident response, and follow-up Expertise in automated testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices in high-stakes production environments Familiarity with observability and operational excellence - monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and blameless learning from incidents Understanding of security, compliance, and non-functional requirements in regulated financial services Ability to stay hands-on - contributing to code, designs, and reviews when that is the fastest way to reduce risk or unblock the team Enjoy a benefits package designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally. You'll receive 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day to relax and recharge. Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind. Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company. We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community. On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more. We're committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants.