Lead Software Engineer

Are you a Senior Software Engineer looking to progress your career or an existing Lead Engineer with a passion for technology, looking to join and lead an ambitious and growing cross-functional DevOps team?

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will be hands-on working in a fast-paced, cloud-first, product driven engineering team. You will be providing technical leadership to the Platform team, as well as collaborating with our Solution & Infrastructure Architects to help translate architecture into solution design. As well as technically leading the Platform engineering team, you will be joining a wider community of technical leads, each of who work within the various product engineering teams, to help drive technical best practice across the PayPoint CTO function.

This position will be based working remotely with the occasional visit fortnightly/monthly to our bright and modern offices in Welwyn Garden City., Technical Leadership & Architecture

• System Ownership: Oversee all aspects of development for an entire product or system, taking ultimate ownership of key decisions regarding the overall technical direction.
• Scalable Design: Design, develop, and maintain technical solutions engineered to support the ongoing growth of the business while meeting functional and non-functional requirements.
• Engineering Excellence: Write and enforce clean code that strictly adheres to SOLID principles and aligns perfectly with the defined solution architecture.
• Production Accountability: Maintain accountability for all deliveries into the Production environment by yourself and other team engineers, ensuring deployments never compromise system stability, availability, or security.
• Security Mindset: Explicitly demonstrate experience designing product features and systems with data and application security in mind from day one.
• Systems Reliability: Ensure the business operates on performant, reliable systems that consistently meet baseline service levels.

AI Integration & Engineering Efficiency

• AI Tooling & Automation: Champion and oversee the ethical, secure adoption of AI coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot) within the team to accelerate development lifecycles and automate routine tasks.
• Agentic Workflows: Architect, evaluate, or integrate AI agents and agentic frameworks to streamline internal operations, automated testing, or enhance product capabilities.
• AI Governance: Establish clear guidelines for the engineering team on code verification, licensing, and security compliance when utilizing generative AI tools.

Team Leadership & Process Optimization

• Team Mentorship: Mentor the engineering team, leading by example to cultivate new skills, explore modern technologies, and implement advanced problem-solving methodologies.
• SDLC Governance: Ensure that the entire application lifecycle, quality assurance mechanisms, database engineering protocols, and automated build and deployment tasks are mature, in place, and thoroughly understood by the team.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively participate in driving continuous improvement across the team's development processes, software tools, and delivery output.
• Agile Collaboration: Partner with the Delivery Manager and Product Owner to help shape the team's day-to-day ways of working within an Agile framework.
• Talent Acquisition: Assist with the recruitment, interviewing, and technical assessment of incoming engineering team members.

Stakeholder Management & Operations

• Cross-Functional Bridging: Bridge the communication gap between the engineering team and other technical or non-technical business units, both internal and external.
• Technical Translation: Assist in translating highly complex technical solutions into accessible, universal language that non-technical staff can clearly understand.
• Stakeholder Support: Support the Product Owner and Delivery Manager in regular communication, timeline setting, and progress updates for senior business stakeholders.
• Deadline Delivery: Maintain focus and drive to deliver high-quality, thoroughly tested software against challenging business deadlines.
• Operational Readiness: Participate as part of an out-of-hours support rota to ensure that all core applications, systems, and services run smoothly at all times.

Do you have experience in xUnit?, * Experience: 5+ years of professional software development experience, with at least 2 years in a formal technical leadership, team lead, or mentoring capacity.

• AI Tool Proficiency: Hands-on experience utilizing AI-assisted development tools to optimize workflows, generate test cases, and refactor legacy codebases efficiently.
• Microsoft & Enterprise Backend: Deep expertise in C# with a proven track record across modern .NET Core / .NET 6+ and legacy .NET Framework (3.5+).
• Azure Cloud Ecosystem: Hands-on experience configuring and maintaining Azure Networking, Storage, Kubernetes (AKS), App Services, API Manager, and Monitoring.
• Messaging & Middleware: Familiarity with messaging frameworks and queued architectures such as Azure Service Bus or MSMQ.
• Database Engineering: High proficiency in relational databases (SQL Server, T-SQL, Stored Procedures) and No-SQL solutions (Cosmos DB).
• Web & API Development: Extensive experience crafting RESTful Web APIs, paired with strong foundational web skills (HTML, CSS/Sass, JavaScript, Node.js, jQuery, ECMAScript).
• Frontend Ecosystems: Experience working with JavaScript frameworks (AngularJS, KnockoutJS) and UI design layouts (Bootstrap, Blazor).
• Testing & Quality Assurance: Dedicated commitment to TDD with mastery in unit test frameworks (NUnit, MSTest, or xUnit.net), Mocking frameworks (Moq), and integration testing.
• DevOps & Version Control: Advanced proficiency using Azure DevOps and Git for source control, build configuration, and deployment automation.

Soft Skills & Delivery

• Problem Solving: Exceptional analytical skills to diagnose complex, distributed runtime environments and data layers.
• Agile Alignment: Complete commitment to delivering high-quality, well-tested software as part of a fast-paced, collaborative agile team (Scrum/Kanban)., * DevSecOps: Practical experience embedding automated security practices (e.g., SAST/DAST tools) directly into CI/CD pipelines.
• ORM Technologies: Production experience with Entity Framework or NHibernate.
• Legacy BI Stack: Competency in Microsoft SSIS (Integration Services) and SSRS (Reporting Services).
• Testing & Monitoring Tools: Experience using Postman/SOAP for API verification, automated UI frameworks (Selenium, Cypress), or enterprise log aggregators (Splunk).
• Mobile Development: Exposure to Android development frameworks.
• Modern Languages: Familiarity with or a strong interest in newer systems languages like Golang or Rust.

Pulled from the full job description

• Employee discount
• Company pension
• On-site gym
• Private medical insurance
• Cycle to work scheme
• Car scheme, * Holiday purchase scheme, with 25 days holiday plus bank holidays as standard.
• On-site gym at our office (Free), and nationwide corporate rate gym membership
• Online benefits portal where you can access lots of deals, discounts - for example of shopping or holidays
• Contributory company pension scheme
• Progression and Development
• Private medical insurance
• Electric Car Scheme
• Life assurance of 3 x annual gross salary, with the option to purchase additional cover
• You're also able to purchase a range of benefits at a discounted rate including, critical illness cover, bicycles via our Cycle2Work scheme, dental insurance and TasteCard dining discount card
• Love2shop Everyday Benefits Card

As a disability-confident committed company, we have a passion for championing equality. We welcome all colleagues into a work environment where success is attainable for everyone, regardless of disability, age, race, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation. We are committed to ensuring that everyone has equal access to growth and opportunities in our workplace.