Software Development Tech Lead
DescriptionA senior engineering leader who is responsible for the technical health, delivery performance, and professional development of their team. The Tech Lead is the primary engineering owner for one or more teams — setting technical direction, building culture, and bridging the gap between engineering and the broader organisation.Tech Leads are expected to actively drive AI-native culture within their team and model best practice for everyone they manage.The step from Technical Project Lead to Tech Lead is the most significant transition in the engineering career path. The TPL role is delivery-focused; the Tech Lead role adds sustained people leadership, team design, and function-level accountability. You are no longer primarily measured by what you build or what your project delivers — you are measured by the health and capability of your team over time. This means investing in people who may not yet be performing, having difficult conversations, and sometimes slowing down delivery to get the team architecture right. It is a fundamentally different role, and the instincts that made you a great TPL will need to evolve.Hands-on contribution remains significant. Approximately 60% of time is spent on direct technical work — coding, design, review, and architectural decision-making — and 40% on line management, stakeholder communication, hiring, and engineering strategy. This reflects Ignite’s current scale and the importance of Tech Lead technical credibility.ResponsibilitiesOwn the technical health of one or more delivery teams: architecture, standards, quality, and cultureLine manage up to 6 engineers directly or up to 10 indirectly, including regular 1:1s, objective setting, development support, and performance managementMake or delegate architectural decisions with confidence, maintaining long-term codebase coherenceBalance hands-on technical contribution with management and leadership responsibilitiesDrive quality and delivery standards across the team, setting clear expectations and holding them consistentlyContribute to sprint planning and prioritisation alongside the Programme Manager and AnalystsLead incident response for the team, ensuring post-mortems produce systemic improvements and address root causesRepresent engineering in stakeholder conversations, communicating clearly on delivery status, technical risk, and capacityPartner with the Head of Engineering on resourcing, team design, and delivery strategyContribute to hiring by defining role requirements, leading technical interviews, and making recommendationsSupport the development of Senior Engineers towards greater leadership capabilityOperate with commercial awareness, understanding the revenue and margin implications of technical decisionsContribute to cross-function engineering strategy and platform-wide architectural decisionsDevelop or contribute to the Ignite repeatability and AI-native agendaContribute to hiring strategy and team design conversations with the Head of EngineeringCarry full line management responsibility for direct reports, including probation management and formal performance processesSupport pay review and promotion recommendations to the Head of EngineeringManage indirect accountability for QA leads and their reports within the Ignite structureAI Leadership Responsibilities Actively use and champion coding harnesses, building team-level harnesses that standardize AI usage for common tasksUnderstand AI agents at an implementation level, including design, risks, and appropriate usageUnderstand and work with skills as reusable AI capabilitiesHave a strong working knowledge of MCP (Model Context Protocol), including tool access, context management, and security implicationsSet expectations for AI tool use within the team, defining what is encouraged, what requires review, and where human verification is requiredStay current with the AI tooling landscape and share relevant developments with the Head of EngineeringQualificationsLanguages: TypeScript and C#/.NET (sufficient depth to review and guide work in both stacks)Frontend: Vue.js (Customer Portal stack — review and governance level)Databases: SQL Server, PostgreSQL (design, performance, governance)Cloud & Infrastructure: Azure (architecture, cost management, security posture)Container Orchestration: Kubernetes (operational and governance level)CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitOps (ownership and governance)Security: ISO 27001 controls implementation and penetration test coordinationTooling: Linear, Git/GitHub, Copilot, monitoring and alerting platforms
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