Engineering Lead - Accountancy

IRIS Software Group is one of the UK's largest privately held software companies, trusted by 100,000+ businesses, schools and accountancy firms to keep their operations running. Our software pays 1 in 6 UK employees, supports over 12,000 schools, and is relied on by 91 of the top 100 UK accountancy firms.

We're a Great Place to Work® certified employer, recognised for our commitment to well-being, inclusion and development - and we're growing fast.

You will be involved in a variety of cutting-edge technical solutions, ranging from the latest .NET technologies using C# to various Front End Web JS Frameworks, all while contributing to our AI-powered platform evolution. You will be supported in your career growth by a highly experienced team, comprehensive learning opportunities, and a vibrant technical community committed to creating exceptional solutions that make a real difference in how our customers operate and succeed.

Role Purpose

The Engineering Lead is a hybrid leadership role that combines technical leadership, agile delivery ownership, and people management. You will lead an autonomous engineering team building modern full-stack web applications using the latest UI frameworks, .NET Core backends, and cloud-native technologies, ensuring both delivery excellence and team development while remaining technically hands-on with containerised, scalable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Delivery Management (40%)

• Ensure projects are scoped, prioritised, and delivered on time with clear alignment to business goals and quarterly OKRs

• Drive predictability, velocity, and quality through effective agile practices and continuous improvement

• Communicate proactively with stakeholders (product, design, leadership, customers) on delivery progress, risks, and dependencies

• Facilitate alignment between technical capabilities and business objectives through clear, strategic communication

• Own team’s Agile maturity, establish team delivery standards, and optimise team practices for maximum effectiveness and predictability

• Balance workload, staffing, and hiring needs to maintain sustainable delivery while planning for growth

• Manage up and across the organisation to secure resources, remove impediments, and represent the team strategically

Technical Leadership & Contribution (40%)

• Provide strategic technical leadership through architectural guidance and critical technical decisions, with selective hands-on contributions

• Define technical decisions and maintain system health through architectural oversight and technical debt management

• Establish and drive comprehensive quality culture including TDD/BDD practices, testing standards, automated quality gates, and team code review excellence

• Define team security standards ensure team compliance governance, and drive security-first culture within the engineering team

• Stay technically current through code reviews, architectural discussions, strategic technical involvement and ensure alignment with broader organisational technical strategy

• Delegate technical execution to senior team members while maintaining oversight and accountability

• Define AI strategy and ensure responsible AI culture across teams

• Empower team decision-making within established frameworks and escalation criteria

• Define team documentation strategy establish governance frameworks for the team, and ensure knowledge management within the engineering team

People Management (20%)

• Line manage engineers including coaching, performance reviews, career planning, and regular 1:1s

• Create inclusive, collaborative environment that enables team success by removing blockers and providing resources

• Develop team members through structured career development, skill building, and succession planning

• Handle performance management including improvement plans, conflict resolution, and team dynamics

Required Experience & Skills

Technical Skills

• Frontend Strategy: Strategic understanding of modern UI frameworks (e.g. Angular, React, Vue.js, Blazor)

• Backend Leadership: Strong understanding of .NET Core, C#, ASP.NET Core Web APIs, REST, application architectures, and distributed systems

• Data Architecture: Strategic knowledge of SQL, NoSQL and data architecture decisions

• AI-Assisted Software Engineering: Experience with integrating AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, Devin, Claude Code, etc.) in engineering practices to accelerate design, development, testing and debugging. Using them critically and responsibly to improve quality, productivity and decision-making.

• CI/CD Strategy: Define team CI/CD strategy, establish team governance frameworks, and ensure adoption of deployment best practices across the team

• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, ARM Templates or AWS CloudFormation/CDK

• Observability Strategy: DataDog, Application Insights or Amazon CloudWatch implementation with comprehensive observability strategy and cloud governance

• Cloud Strategy: Strategic SAAS using Azure (Functions, Queue, Blob Storage, VMs, etc) or AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, EC2, etc.) ecosystems

• Container Orchestration: Advanced Container (e.g. Docker) and Kubernetes (AKS/EKS) with production-scale deployments

• Architecture Governance: Expertise in clean architecture, domain-driven design, and application architectural patterns

• Scalable Solutions: Experience with highly scalable solutions and internet-facing traffic levels

• Quality & Testing Leadership: Define team testing strategy, establish quality governance for the team, and measure team adoption with continuous improvement initiatives

• Application Security: Confident vulnerability management, thread modelling and tracking

• Production Support: Knowledge of observability and production support practices

Experience Requirements

• 6+ years in software engineering, minimum 1 year of formal people management experience OR 2+ years of technical leadership with mentoring responsibilities

• Demonstrable experience delivering complex software projects using Agile methodologies

• Proven recent technical skills with strategic contributions to production systems

• Code review leadership with experience establishing review standards and culture

• Demonstrated ability to balance technical excellence with business delivery requirements

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills

• Effective prioritisation and negotiation abilities

• Strong analytical and strategic thinking capabilities

• Ability to balance technical excellence with business delivery requirements

• Fostering collaboration, promoting team building and culture development skills

Desirable Skills

• Experience working with regulated or complex domains (finance, health, govtech) with audit requirements

• Experience line managing engineers including 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development

• Experience with platform engineering or shared service teams building reusable UI components and backend services

• Experience designing high-quality AI interactions through effective prompt engineering, efficient token usage, and optimisation techniques, combined with practical use of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to integrate AI systems with tools and services for richer, automated workflows

• Expertise with advanced monitoring and APM strategies using DataDog, including custom dashboards and alerting

• Advanced understanding of modern UI architecture patterns (micro-frontends, SSR/SSG)

• Experience as Engineering Lead, Tech Lead, or similar leadership role with full-stack teams

• Exposure to DevOps processes and automation ensuring end-to-end responsibility of features

• Advanced cloud certifications in Azure or AWS

Key Relationships

• Internal: Engineering Teams, Engineering Directors, Product Owners/Managers, QA Teams, DevOps Teams, Platform Teams

• External: Professional Services, Customer Support, Third-party vendors and partners

• Leadership: Engineering Director, VP Engineering, Product Leadership, Executive Team

Success Measures

• Delivery Excellence: Sprint goals achieved, predictable releases, strong velocity, and minimal carry-over

• Technical Leadership: High team code quality, effective architecture decisions, reduced technical debt, improved scalability, and proactive tooling adoption

• Strategic Leadership: Selective technical contributions to critical decisions with effective delegation

• Quality Excellence: Team adoption of automated TDD/BDD and code review practices with effective quality gates and measurable quality improvements

• People Development: Autonomous team with strong ownership, positive engagement scores, clear development objectives, low attrition, and active succession planning

• Cross-Functional Impact: Strong collaboration with Product, Design, and Platform teams, supported by positive stakeholder feedback

• Business Alignment: Quarterly OKRs/KPIs achieved or exceeded with clear business impact

• Impact: Your work will influence millions globally.

• Growth: Continuous learning and career development opportunities.

• Belonging: A culture that celebrates diversity and empowers every individual.
  

Click Apply - we’re excited to learn about your unique perspective and experience. If you need adjustments during the process, let us know. We’re committed to making this opportunity accessible to everyone.

Our process is designed to be fair, transparent and straightforward. Stages vary depending on the role — more senior positions may involve additional steps, and some areas include role-specific assessments such as a technical test or case study — but typically you can expect:

1. Application review — we assess your experience and potential

2. Initial call — a short conversation to learn about you and share more about the role

3. Skills assessment — tailored to the position, e.g. case study, coding challenge or portfolio review

4. Final interview — meet the team and explore how you'll make an IMPACT at IRIS

We'll always walk you through the specific stages at the start of the process so you can prepare with confidence.

If you need any adjustments or accommodations during the process, let us know, we’re committed to making this experience accessible for everyone.