Software Engineering Lead

Ready to shape engineering at scale? As our Engineering Lead, you'll drive the platforms and tooling that help teams deliver faster, safer, and smarter.

Here at Cushon by WTW, we like to do things a bit differently… our mission is to help as many people as possible to get comfortable with their finances.

Our vision is to bring tech revolution to the financial services industry. We will do this by building simple, convenient, and delightful financial experiences centred on the individual. These will accumulate incrementally until one morning we will wake up and realise Cushon has become one of the UK’s best-loved financial apps.

We offer workplace savings products & pensions to customers, either directly, or through employee benefit programs at some of the largest corporates in the UK.

We're a technology-led organisation who believe we can offer great value to customers by building a user-friendly, smart, and cost-effective investment platform that automates many of the processes that would otherwise require large operations teams to manage.

So, to support us in this mission, we are looking for an Engineering Lead to provide technical leadership for one of our teams. You will help set direction for shared infrastructure and engineering operations — the production hosting, security perimeter, release pipelines, observability, and developer tooling that every engineering squad depends on to ship safely. This is a role that includes Line Management responsibility for your team of 5-7 Engineers with the assistance of an assigned Engineering Manager.

The Role

Technical Leadership

• Lead the evolution of backend architecture across our PHP platform, Go services, and GraphQL/API layers — balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability
• Guide API and domain design standards — clear service boundaries, consistent contracts, and pragmatic integration between modern services and legacy systems
• Shape event-driven and integration patterns so teams can build independently without breaking cross-squad journeys
• Champion automated testing, observability, and production readiness for backend services — PHPUnit, Go tests, Datadog, and safe release practices
• Oversee database and schema evolution practices — migrations, data integrity, and performance — in partnership with platform and infrastructure teams
• Lead incident response for backend-owned systems — triage, escalation, post-incident reviews, and runbook quality
• Mentor engineers on PHP (Yii/Yii2), Go, Security, Performance and Optimisation — raising the bar through design review and hands-on contribution when needed
• Support production readiness for high-risk changes — coordinated cutovers, rollouts, and cross-team dependencies at the legacy/modern boundary

Delivery Leadership

• Drive successful delivery of your part of complex, multi-team initiatives by coordinating resources, managing dependencies, and removing blockers
• Define and communicate technical strategy for your domain area, improving delivery processes and engineering practices within your area
• Build strong relationships across product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders
• Help teams maintain focus on priorities while managing technical debt and operational responsibilities
• Foster collaboration and alignment across teams, engaging with other Engineering Leads and leading engineering-wide initiatives.

People & Developer experience

• Effective Line management and the passion to coach and mentor team members in delivery practices and technical leadership
• Stay hands-on — contributing designs, code, config, and runbooks when that is the fastest way to reduce risk but also know when to step back and allow the team to take the helm
• Improve developer experience: local environments, self-service tooling, documentation, and onboarding for new engineers
• Contribute to hiring and raising the bar for future Engineers