Tech Lead Software Engineer

We are looking for a Tech Lead Software Engineer with deep AWS cloud expertise to lead the design and delivery of cloud-native solutions for a large-scale, highly visible digital environment (DWP context). You'll combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership, guiding teams, shaping architecture, and driving best practice across cloud, DevOps, and modern software delivery.

This role is ideal for someone who is as comfortable designing and building as they are influencing, advising, and leading.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and development of cloud-native applications on AWS.
• Act as the technical authority for delivery teams, making decisions and providing clear direction.
• Design and implement scalable, secure, and resilient solutions using modern engineering practices.
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines to support continuous delivery.
• Provide technical insight and input into wider business and DWP discussions, helping shape new products and solutions.
• Work closely with delivery, production, security and infrastructure teams to ensure products are:
• Highly resilient
• Secure
• Scalable
• Highly available
• Offer definitive technical advice to diverse teams, negotiating and influencing to gain consensus on complex or contentious issues.
• Contribute to the exploration and adoption of new technologies, including AI/ML and automation.

AWS Cloud Expertise

• Deep understanding of core AWS services: EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudFormation, etc.
• Experience with serverless architectures and containerisation (ECS, EKS, Fargate).
• Familiarity with the AWS Well-Architected Framework and cost optimisation strategies.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Proficiency with tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
• Experience building and maintaining infrastructure-as-code in production environments.

DevOps & CI/CD

• Hands-on experience creating and supporting CI/CD pipelines using tools such as:
• AWS CodePipeline
• Jenkins
• GitHub Actions
• GitLab CI
• Knowledge of monitoring and logging tools (e.g. CloudWatch, ELK stack, Prometheus, Grafana).

Programming & Architecture

• Strong coding skills in Python, Java, Node.js or Go.
• Experience designing secure, scalable, resilient cloud-native applications.
• Experience creating cloud-based solutions using:
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Node.js
• SQL
• Docker

Additional Experience

• Comfortable acting on own authority to steer projects and justify decisions with solid analysis and evidence.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code at scale.
• Awareness of open-source AI/ML models and how to integrate them into cloud-based solutions.
• Awareness of robotic process automation (RPA) tools such as UiPath or Blue Prism.
• Able to provide technical insight into wider business discussions, helping define new products and technical strategies.
• Strong communication skills, able to negotiate, persuade and gain consensus across diverse technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience working to DWP or similar government standards, ensuring alignment to best practices in security, performance and compliance.