Engineering Manager

The role

Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, you will be responsible for the people management, technical direction, and delivery performance of your team. You will play a critical role in building a high-performing engineering culture, ensuring your team delivers high-quality work to our clients while continuously developing their skills and careers. You will take the lead across your team’s projects, providing guidance and support while ensuring your engineers are managed in line with our departmental strategy to achieve Equator’s goals.

Main Responsibilities

People Management & Leadership

Our people are key to our success, therefore our Engineering Managers are vital to ensuring our engineers are supported and have what they need to be successful at Equator. Some of the key responsibilities from a management and leadership perspective are:

• Line manage a team of software engineers, providing regular 1:1s, coaching, mentoring, and career development support.
• Monitor the effectiveness of mentoring activity within the team and ensure all team members are receiving appropriate support. Identify further training requirements, both formal and informal.
• Ensure that all team members have a personal development plan that complements the company’s requirements for staff official accreditation. Coordinate plans to ensure we meet the required number of accredited staff members at any given time.
• Proactively monitor team performance on projects and support where needed and course correct to mitigate delivery risks to timeline or budgets.
• Review feedback for team members’ appraisals and ensure that balanced feedback is sought. Implement and discuss actions based on feedback with the Head of Engineering, ensuring actions are monitored and progressed throughout the year.
• Take responsibility for recruitment activity within your team, including defining role requirements, interviewing candidates, and onboarding new hires.
• Foster a positive, inclusive, and psychologically safe team environment.

Delivery & Execution

You will typically be involved on specific projects, taking on the Engineering Project Lead role. This can be purely management support or a “player/coach” role where you contribute hands on engineering tasks. You will: 

• Ensure you have a good overall view of all projects within your team. Provide appropriate support to ensure project progress is efficient. 
• Be accountable for the engineering team performance on the project including delivery timeline predictability and adherence to agreed timeline and budgets.
• Ensure estimates are created for all work and that all estimates are reviewed and approved. Verify that estimates are accurate, reasonable, and that project approach and tooling is in keeping with established team practices and methodologies.
• Ensure you and any engineers you are leading are using appropriate tools so that progress and issues can be monitored at all times
•  Own and improve the team’s delivery processes, including sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, and release management.
• Attend morning huddles and report any issues to the Head of Engineering as required.
• Ensure that project retrospectives are carried out after all development projects, whether as part of the wider project team or with a specific focus on development.
• Monitor team velocity and capacity, balancing feature delivery with technical debt reduction and operational work.
• Ensure project risks are communicated with Project Manager and documented on the risk log.
• Participate in the development team support rota system.

Technical Direction & Quality

Our Engineering Managers are responsible for inputting to the technical direction of our tech stack, leading with high standards for quality and ensuring these are consistently applied in our projects. You will: 

• Ensure all solution designs are appropriately documented so that deliverables are clear and easily communicated to other teams at Equator. 
• Ensure that code review schedules are set at the beginning of a project and carried out.
• Any work not meeting project approach and engineering standards should be identified early and course corrected.
• Ensure all work produced by you and your team is tested using appropriate tools and techniques. The approach and tools used should be discussed and agreed before a project begins.
• Promote engineering best practices including code review, testing, CI/CD, observability, and documentation.
• Encourage the investigation of new technologies via our Tech Radar documentation. Ensure that the risk of new technology introduction is properly assessed and any potential impact is fully understood by all involved.
• Collaborate with the Head of Engineering and other engineering managers on technical standards and tooling.
• Collaborate with the Head of Engineering and other engineering managers on our strategic roadmap - owning and directing initiatives where appropriate

The Ideal Candidate

Essential

• Demonstrable experience managing and developing a team of software engineers.
• Strong technical background with hands-on software engineering experience.
• Proven ability to deliver software projects in a collaborative, agile environment.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to mentor, lead, and make decisive decisions.
• Strong organisational skills and attention to detail.
• Enthusiasm, a positive attitude, and a keen interest in all things software engineering.
• A genuine passion for growing people and building high-performing teams.

Desirable

• Experience working in a digital agency or similar client-facing environment.
• Familiarity with modern software engineering practices, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps principles.
• Experience with agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, or similar).
• Understanding of information security management systems and compliance requirements.
• A track record of driving process improvement and engineering culture initiatives.

Salary

£70,000 - £85,000