Lead Software Engineer

We're Engage - one of the UK's leading education recruitment agencies, having proudly expanded into the EdTech space and shaking up the way things are done. We are now looking to appoint someone to lead the next phase of our road map and ongoing development of our technology.

Officially ranked the 7th best recruitment company to work for in the UK, we're recognised for delivering world-class employee engagement.

Our mission is simple: we help schools hire brilliant staff, and we help education professionals find roles they truly love.

Role Summary

We are seeking a highly experienced, strategic Lead Software Engineer to lead our onshore team. You will utilise Generative AI tools to amplify the velocity and quality of development, focusing the team's efforts on Architectural Curation, deep systems thinking, and structural integrity.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural Modernisation and re-platforming

• Lead the comprehensive strategic planning and execution of the continued migration from ASP.NET 4.8 MVC/WebAPI project to ASP.NET Core.
• Standardise the core application infrastructure by implementing standard middleware (e.g., JWT middleware) & replace existing authentication and token plumbing.
• Implement long-running processes using out-of-band message-based architecture.

AI Curation, Quality, and Governance

• Act as the Architectural Curator, using strict Human-in-the-Loop (HiTL) validation.
• Establish and enforce rigorous code quality metrics across the team.
• Implement static analysis tools to quantify quality and ensure adherence to defined coding standards.
• Define clear testing goals and drive the adoption of testing practices.
• Develop role-appropriate AI training and prompting strategies, ensuring that AI tools are used to focus on non-automatable cognitive skills and high-level strategy, rather than fostering over-reliance that hinders fundamental learning.

Strategic Leadership and Risk Management

• Use extensive experience to foresee problems, analyse trade-offs (scalability, maintainability, security), and introduce backup plans and redundancy into system designs.
• Guide the team in achieving rapid development velocity.
• Champion a culture of data-driven improvement by utilising observability tools to track productivity metrics (like deployment frequency and release quality) and build trust in the development process.
• Focus on code readability and documentation, simplifying onboarding for new developers navigating complex system structure.

Required Skills and Experience

Platform Expertise: Deep architectural knowledge of the .NET (Framework and Core) ecosystem (C#, ASP.NET MVC/Web API) & SQL Server, with demonstrated experience migrating large solutions to ASP.NET Core.

• Architectural Proficiency: Proven ability to implement modern design patterns and design decoupled systems, with a focus on designing for testability.
• AI Fluency: Expertise in leveraging advanced AI coding assistants (such as Cursor or GitHub Copilot) to accelerate productivity while exercising critical judgment to verify and curate AI output.
• Quality Management: Experience defining and enforcing coding standards, measuring code quality using static analysis tools (e.g., SonarQube or NDepend), and implementing rigorous Test Coverage policies.
• Mindset: Ability to balance programmer optimism (the belief that a solution exists) with the realism needed to foresee and ensure potential long-term architectural suitability.

Why us?

• Share options available
• Remote working available with the ability to work from any of our UK offices
• OTE £100K +