Software Engineering Lead

Overview

In this Engineering Lead role, you guide platforms and tooling that enable squads to ship faster, securely, and intelligently within Cushon by WTW. You will shape backend architecture across PHP, Go, and GraphQL layers, set standards for API design, and promote automated testing and observability. You’ll manage a 5–7 engineer team with support from an Engineering Manager, focusing on production readiness and cross-team collaboration. This is a hands-on leadership role at a regulated fintech poised to transform financial services.

Pay / Benefits

• 25 days annual leave
• private healthcare
• group income protection
• defined contribution pension with 10% matched contributions
• hybrid working
• volunteer day

Responsibilities

• Lead backend architecture across PHP, Go, and GraphQL/API layers to balance speed and maintainability
• Define API/domain design standards and service boundaries, integrating modern and legacy systems
• Shape event-driven and integration patterns to enable team autonomy
• Champion automated testing, observability, and safe release practices for backend services
• Oversee database schema evolution, migrations, and data integrity in partnership with platform teams
• Lead incident response for backend systems, including post-incident reviews and runbook quality
• Mentor engineers in PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, security, performance and optimization
• Support production readiness for high-risk changes with coordinated cutovers and cross-team dependencies
• Drive delivery for multi-team initiatives by coordinating resources and removing blockers
• Define technical strategy for domain area and improve delivery processes and practices
• Foster collaboration with product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders
• Improve developer experience, tooling, documentation, and onboarding
• Contribute to hiring and raise the bar for future engineers

Key requirements

• Leadership 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 the squad (backend, frontend, mobile, QA, or platform operations)
• Proven track record owning production systems end-to-end (implementation, rollout, monitoring, incident response)
• Experience delivering complex initiatives with multiple engineers and teams
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to balance trade-offs for maintainable solutions
• Expertise in automated testing, CI/CD, and safe release practices in production
• Familiarity with observability and operational excellence (monitoring, alerting, runbooks)
• Understanding of security, compliance, and non-functional requirements in regulated financial services
• Comfortable working across modern and legacy systems and hands-on when needed

• Strong stakeholder management and communication at all levels
• Coaching and mentoring capability
• Collaborative and resilient mindset
• Backend engineering (PHP with Yii/Yii2, Go)
• GraphQL/API design and service boundaries
• Event-driven architectures and integration patterns

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