Engineer Manager

About the role

The University of Cambridge is seeking a hands-on Tech Lead and Engineer Manager to lead a team of engineers building new cloud-native services and modernising existing applications. You will combine technical leadership (including hands-on with people management, setting technical direction while growing your team.

This is a hybrid position based in Cambridge, with amazing benefits, like a defined benefit pension and 41 days of annual leave inclusive of public holidays.

Many of our services are public-facing, supporting 60,000 University members, so your team's work directly affects the reputation of one of the world's leading universities.

We build using modern web architectural standards emphasising APIs, automation, and CI/CD, maintain a DevOps culture, and are "open by default". Our stack includes Google Cloud, Terraform, GitLab, Python, Django, React, and TypeScript.

See our projects in GitLab at https://gitlab.developers.cam.ac.uk/uis/devops and our practices in our Guidebook at https://guidebook.devops.uis.cam.ac.uk/.

What we're looking for

You will be an experienced engineering leader, highly skilled in modern software development, testing, security, and operations, and an expert in:

• Architecting secure-by-design web applications and APIs with a focus on maintainability and stability, using clean code.
• Integrating applications via APIs, event buses, and / or asynchronous tasks.
• Packaging applications in Docker and building CI/CD pipelines in GitLab to deploy to Google Cloud using Terraform.
• Running services in production: reliability, observability, and incident response against clear SLOs.
• Applying testing best practices and conducting thorough code reviews.
• Using AI coding assistants effectively, writing clear prompts, critically reviewing AI-generated code, and taking responsibility for its correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Adopting AI strategically and securely across your team and services, setting good practice for its safe use.
• Managing technical and delivery risk, including threat modelling, data protection, and compliance.
• Driving improvements in architecture, standards, and processes, balancing new delivery against technical debt, and choosing whether to switch off, extend, build, or buy.

Ways of working:

• Stay hands-on, contributing high-quality production code, designs, and reviews, and leading by example, while balancing this with your management responsibilities.
• Communicate clearly and collaborate with colleagues and users to gather and break down requirements.
• Focus on delivery, and drive work to completion, while continuously improving existing services.
• Learn new skills proactively.

What you'll be responsible for:

• Leading, mentoring, and coaching your cross-functional team using an agile, DevOps approach: one-to-ones, objectives, appraisals, career growth, and addressing underperformance.
• Recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding engineers, and planning team capacity and workload.
• Managing requirements, priorities, and dependencies across products and teams, including sprint scheduling and backlog grooming.
• Tracking delivery and team-health metrics, and reporting progress and risks to leadership.
• Owning budget, SaaS, licensing, and supplier decisions, with competitive analysis of options.
• Setting technical direction and championing engineering quality, security, and knowledge-sharing, including our Guidebook, runbooks, and architecture decisions.

You will join a team of Tech Leads and Engineer Managers, reporting to the Head of Development and Operations (DevOps).

You don't need to tick every box; if you're excited about this role, we'd encourage you to apply.

We particularly welcome applications from women and /or candidates from a BME background for this vacancy as they are currently under-represented at this level in our department.

The University actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion and encourages applications from all sections of society.

Advert information