Engineering Team Lead

Location: Cardiff

Hybrid/Flexible Working

Salary: Up to £75k depending on experience, plus a potential bonus up to £15k

You'll join the Engineering Team at LDMS, reporting to Engineering Management and leading around 6-8 engineers organised into two teams that build financial software for our partners and clients.

This is a leadership role for someone with a strong engineering background who is passionate about growing engineers. Your two main focuses are your teams' delivery output and the development of the people in them. You'll spend most of your time coaching, unblocking and setting direction, staying close enough to the technical work to guide design decisions and support the team through reviews. That technical grounding is what makes you effective.

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Technical Leadership:

• Set clear technical direction for your teams, keeping decisions aligned to team and product goals
• Guide design and technical decisions and support a review culture that raises quality and teaches, rather than just approves
• Spot technical debt early and work closely with your lead/senior engineers to ensure engineering standards are adopted across both teams

Delivery and Execution:

• Plan and track delivery across both teams, raising risks and scope changes early
• Break complex work into deliverable increments with clear dependencies and acceptable criteria
• Run delivery sessions and workshops, such as whiteboarding an area, to shape and unblock work
• Keep an eye on dependencies between your teams and with other teams, and flag them early
• Make sensible trade-offs on scope, quality and pace under pressure, and keep delivery moving
• Balance the team's time between product features and technical debt
• Keep the team's ways of working lean and adaptable, using process and meetings where they genuinely help rather than running them by default

People and Development:

• Mentor and coach your engineers through guidance, review and honest career conversations
• Run regular, structured one-to-ones focused on growth, wellbeing and clearing blockers
• Give direct, evidence-based feedback and support each person’s development and progression
• Interview and hire strong engineers into your teams
• Build a strong team culture with high standards and psychological safety

AI and Innovation

• Encourage the team to use AI where it clearly helps them work faster or produce better software, and to be honest about where it doesn’t
• Make sensible use of AI and automation part of how the team works day to day, rather than something tried once and dropped
• Use simple measures of how the team is doing to spot progress and catch work that’s slipping or running over

Stakeholder and Communication

• Communicate your teams’ technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to product and non-technical colleagues.
• Manage stakeholder expectations proactively, so status updates contain no surprises.
• Escalate issues to Engineering Management at the right time and in the right way, with options rather than problems.
• Communicate release content to customers and support their delivery questions, giving confidence in what’s coming and when

Essential:

• A strong understanding of how good software gets built (preferably hands-on in Java/Spring Boot), with the technical judgement to guide design decisions, PR reviews and assess quality across your teams
• A proven track record of planning, tracking and delivering software projects, including managing dependencies and trade-offs
• Experience managing stakeholders and communicating delivery status, risks and trade-offs clearly to non-technical and customer-facing audiences, in writing and in person
• Line management experience, or a strong track record of coaching and mentoring with the readiness to take on formal line management
• A genuine interest in progressing engineers’ careers
• Comfortable using data and metrics to report progress and identify problems early

Desirable:

• An interest in using AI to help teams build software
• Experience within the financial sector
• Experience in front end development (preferably in React/Typescript)
• Experience working with modern Continuous Integration tooling, such as Jenkins
• Experience debugging and troubleshooting issues using monitoring and observability tooling, such as Grafana, Prometheus or equivalent

LDMS are pioneers of credit software, with a 20 year history of delivering state-of-the-art loan management solutions across EMEA. Our platform has powered the formidable growth of LC Financial Holdings, now managing over €60bn in assets across 10 countries and over 7 million customer accounts.

LDMS supports multi-jurisdictional, language and currency; our processes and products ensure maximum flexibility and empower every single user to be more effective, with surety of regulatory compliance. The best technology provides a true business advantage. Based in our Cardiff tech hub, we have a 80-strong team of highly experienced engineers providing full professional services implementation support by dedicated experts.

LDMS
11 Belgrave Road, London, England, SW1V 1RB