Ruby on Rails Lead Engineer

Location: London, Potters Bar, Bristol or Isle of Man (Hybrid working options available)

Canada Life UK has helped individuals, families and businesses secure their financial futures for over 120 years. We are evolving into a more modern, customer-centric, and engineering-led organisation. As we modernise our IT estate and shifting our focus towards cloud, SaaS/PaaS, and product-centric delivery models, we are creating engineering excellence and empowered teams.

Job Purpose

We are now looking for a Lead Engineer to provide hands on technical leadership within our Home Finance product engineering team – the team responsible for the systems that power our mortgage origination and servicing capabilities.

Why join us?

• Shape the future of Home Finance - You will lead the technical evolution of our bespoke Ruby on Rails based mortgage origination and servicing platform, designing modern, resilient and scalable solutions. Our bespoke mortgage system is built using Ruby on Rails, MySQL & JavaScript.
• True empowerment and autonomy - You will be in a hands on role where you influence architecture, delivery, operational excellence and culture across the product. You will work closely with Product Owners, Engineering Managers and operational teams to optimise flow, deliver customer value and modernise our platforms.
• Modern engineering focus - You will drive adoption of agile, DevSecOps and modern engineering practices, optimising the flow of change and reducing time to value. You will help shape the technology roadmap and contribute to architectural decisions and cloud migration strategies.

Key Duties/Responsibilities

This is a hands on Lead Engineer role in a stream aligned product engineering team, focused on the Home Finance application stack. You will set and uphold technical standards, guide solution design and support the team in delivering high quality, compliant software that underpins our Home Finance operations and customer outcomes.

In this role responsibilities include:

• Lead, coach and inspire engineers in a stream aligned product team, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, psychological safety and high performance.
• Deepen our adoption of agile, DevSecOps and modern engineering practices, optimising the flow of change and reducing time to value.
• Collaborate cross functionally to deliver secure, stable and scalable solutions that support Home Finance operations and customer outcomes.
• Ensure regulatory compliance (including FCA MCOB) and operational excellence across the platform.
• Shape the technology roadmap, contributing to architectural decisions and cloud migration strategies.
• Manage operational risk, security posture, monitoring, alerting and incident response for Home Finance systems.
• Use data and insights to guide prioritisation, engineering improvements and product decisions.
• Support the Engineering Manager with talent development to build a high performing engineering capability.
• Remove waste to improve cost efficiency and increase value delivery for our customers.
• Define and track team and departmental OKRs, ensuring alignment with Canada Life’s strategy.
• Build strong relationships with third party suppliers to maximise value and service quality.

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

Technical expertise

• Bring strong, hands on engineering skills together with the breadth to lead a modern product centric team.
• Strong understanding of mortgage origination/administration systems or comparable regulated financial platforms.
• Experience delivering and operating web based MVC applications (e.g. Ruby on Rails, React) and APIs.
• Skilled in designing, managing and optimising relational SQL databases.
• Hands on knowledge of cloud platforms (Azure or GCP) and cloud native architectures.
• Broad engineering experience across DevSecOps, automation, CI/CD, infrastructure, monitoring and security best practice (“shift left”).
• Proven track record of running critical production services with a focus on stability, performance and security.
• Experience with React or other modern JavaScript frameworks is highly desirable, complementing our Ruby on Rails and JavaScript mortgage platform.
• Comfortable designing, building, testing, deploying and supporting software using agile and DevOps practices, and improving the route to production through automated CI/CD pipelines and environment support up to and including production.

Leadership and delivery

• Experience to helping build high performing, motivated and curious teams.
• Confident working with OKRs and outcome driven delivery.
• Able to communicate complex technical ideas simply and persuasively.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity, prioritising effectively and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Collaborative, pragmatic and adept at building trust across product, engineering and operational teams.
• Demonstrate strong teamwork, communication and problem solving skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross functional teams, alongside excellent time and self management through effective planning and prioritisation of tasks.
• Proven and demonstrable engineering capability, with experience leading on technical delivery
• A passion for modern, inclusive engineering and the ability to inspire and develop others.