Software Engineering Team Lead - UK Home Office at UK Home Office (Croydon, UK)

What is a software engineering team leader for us at Home Office?

Your role is split into two equal parts, 50% of your time will be focused on your teams delivery, the quality they produce and the overall growth of the engineers within those teams including taking on line management responsibilities. The other 50% of your time will be to produce and execute and that means having skin in the game. This can be in the form of writing code, testing solutions or any other way to help your team execute and release!

Your focus, primarily is on people & delivery, setting the direction, strategy and management of multiple projects. You’ll lead and coach a multidisciplinary team to build, improve, and maintain critical digital services relied upon by the UK public and government - This work matters!

About You

As an experienced Software Developer that wants to try leadership, or an experienced technical leader looking for a new challenge, you’ll be taking on a leadership role in a truly unique technical space that offers many challenges that we’re confident will provide an amazing experience to truly have an impact!

We offer training packages to ensure you get the best guidance and support to help you succeed!

What you'll be doing

You’ll play a part in recruiting your new team and leading the way it works, making decisions that affect your own and wider teams. You’ll enjoy engaging with others, collaborating, finding solutions to problems and take a ‘people first’ approach relishing the opportunity to develop others to reach their full potential through advising, guiding, mentoring and coaching to help grow their career.

As mentioned half of your time will be hands on technical with the remainder leadership, management and stakeholder engagement but ultimately, it’s up to you, you decide how your team works. You’ll be focused on the delivery, but also ‘keep you hand in’ guiding and motivating team members to deliver, creating an environment that ensures team happiness and success. With complete autonomy you’ll decide how to manage and get the best out of your team, and with our new performance benefits you as a line manager will have the ability to reward excellent work through various ways!

Your key areas of impact

• building and leading an agile software engineering team delivering with high performance and high quality


• taking a hands-on role with engineering delivery where necessary, blending your leadership and technical skills to achieve team objectives


• growing and developing team members as well as Supporting Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and encouraging formal professional qualifications


• working with your peers to improve our tools, technologies, guidance and standards


• progressing the Digital Data and Technology profession, understanding all roles and helping to build our engineering community

What you'll need

Our people are important to us, and we put them at the heart of what we do, we’re looking for someone who embraces that philosophy and recognises the importance of diversity, continuous improvement, listening and learning from others, building trust and mutual respect.

You’ll combine leadership and line management expertise with your software engineering capability. We’re building new teams too and you would actively participate in the hiring and on-boarding of those team members.

You’ll have a demonstrable passion for leading engineering teams with the following skills or proven experience in:

• using Java / JavaScript or another modern programming language


• defining RESTful APIs


• building new services and establishing and developing common approaches , contributing to technical strategy, helping to deliver consistently and iterate quickly


• leading test-driven development with a focus on automation


• working within an agile environment


• taking a “people first” approach and caring deeply about nurturing a healthy team culture


• working through all aspects of the software delivery lifecycle with focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery

If you like being at the heart of something big, making decisions, both autonomously and with others, ensuring work is prioritised and completed to recognised standards, along with implementing and shaping future services for users then this role is for you!

You can learn more about the work we do by grabbing a ticket to our event on 27th July - Grab a ticket