Software Development Tech Lead

Description

A 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.

Responsibilities

Own the technical health of one or more delivery teams: architecture, standards, quality, and culture

Line manage up to 6 engineers directly or up to 10 indirectly, including regular 1:1s, objective setting, development support, and performance management

Make or delegate architectural decisions with confidence, maintaining long-term codebase coherence

Balance hands-on technical contribution with management and leadership responsibilities

Drive quality and delivery standards across the team, setting clear expectations and holding them consistently

Contribute to sprint planning and prioritisation alongside the Programme Manager and Analysts

Lead incident response for the team, ensuring post-mortems produce systemic improvements and address root causes

Represent engineering in stakeholder conversations, communicating clearly on delivery status, technical risk, and capacity

Partner with the Head of Engineering on resourcing, team design, and delivery strategy

Contribute to hiring by defining role requirements, leading technical interviews, and making recommendations

Support the development of Senior Engineers towards greater leadership capability

Operate with commercial awareness, understanding the revenue and margin implications of technical decisions

Contribute to cross-function engineering strategy and platform-wide architectural decisions

Develop or contribute to the Ignite repeatability and AI-native agenda

Contribute to hiring strategy and team design conversations with the Head of Engineering

Carry full line management responsibility for direct reports, including probation management and formal performance processes

Support pay review and promotion recommendations to the Head of Engineering

Manage indirect accountability for QA leads and their reports within the Ignite structure

AI Leadership Responsibilities

Actively use and champion coding harnesses, building team-level harnesses that standardize AI usage for common tasks

Understand AI agents at an implementation level, including design, risks, and appropriate usage

Understand and work with skills as reusable AI capabilities

Have a strong working knowledge of MCP (Model Context Protocol), including tool access, context management, and security implications

Set expectations for AI tool use within the team, defining what is encouraged, what requires review, and where human verification is required

Stay current with the AI tooling landscape and share relevant developments with the Head of Engineering

Qualifications

Languages: 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 coordination

Tooling: Linear, Git/GitHub, Copilot, monitoring and alerting platforms