About IRIS Software Group
IRIS Software Group is one of the UK’s largest privately held software companies, providing mission-critical solutions that help organisations reduce admin, improve efficiency, and focus on what matters. For over 45 years, we’ve grown from an accounting software provider to a global partner trusted by 100,000+ customers in 135 countries, including 50 of the Top 100 CPA firms in North America.
Our cloud-based accounting, HR, payroll, and education solutions are developed through our Centres of Excellence in India and Romania. Today, 1 in 6 UK employees are paid through IRIS payroll, we are the largest third-party online tax filer with HMRC, and our education software supports 12,000+ schools and 4 million families.
In 2024, we received multiple industry recognitions, including the Payroll Innovation Award (Global Payroll Association), Best EdTech Product (Global EdTech Awards), and Microsoft Security Partner of the Year. We are also proud to be consistently named a Great Place to Work, including Best Workplaces in Tech, Wellbeing, and for Women.
The Engineering Lead is a hybrid leadership role that combines technical leadership, agile delivery ownership, and people management. This role is designed to lead a single autonomous engineering team, ensuring both delivery excellence and team development, while remaining technically hands-on. The Engineering Lead will be accountable for shaping technical direction, driving high-quality outcomes, and fostering a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
This role consolidates responsibilities previously held by the Agile Delivery Manager, Engineering Manager, and Lead Engineer.
Key Responsibilities
1. Delivery Ownership (40%)
2. Ensure timely, high-quality delivery of features and enhancements aligned with business goals.
3. Drive predictability, velocity, and quality in delivery through agile practices.
4. Provide clear and proactive stakeholder updates on delivery progress, risks, and blockers.
5. Technical Leadership & Contribution (40%)
6. Stay technically hands-on, contributing to code, reviews, and architecture decisions.
7. Define and document technical decisions, patterns, and team ways-of-working.
8. Improve product reliability, resilience, scalability, and technical debt management.
9. Explore and adopt new engineering tools and practices to enhance delivery velocity, test coverage, and documentation.
10. People Leadership (20%)
11. Build and develop a high-functioning team with strong ownership and autonomy.
12. Support career growth, succession planning, and personal development initiatives.
13. Foster positive engagement, collaboration, and cross-functional partnerships.
Expected Outputs
14. Lead exploration and application of AI tooling (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Cursor etc.) to improve engineering velocity and quality. Actively share experiences with partner teams.
15. A high-performing, autonomous team with strong ownership and succession planning.
16. Documented technical decisions, architecture patterns, and team processes.
17. Quarterly OKRs/KPIs achieved or exceeded.
18. Transparent communication with stakeholders on delivery status, risks, and dependencies.
Required Experience
19. 8+ years in software engineering, with 2+ years in a team lead or technical leadership capacity – this may be on a formal or informal basis.
20. Demonstrable experience delivering complex software projects using Agile methodologies.
21. Proven technical skills in a relevant tech stack with recent hands-on contributions.
22. Experience of working on highly scalable solutions, with internet facing traffic levels, deployed to the cloud.
23. Strong understanding of software delivery lifecycle, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps principles.
24. Experience with observability, security, and production support practices.
25. Excellent communication, collaboration and stakeholder management skills.
26. Effective prioritisation and negotiation skills
27. Demonstrable experience in the following technologies related to SAAS and best software development practices such as, Microsoft .Net stack, Azure, C#, .NET Core, ReactJS, Blazor, Web API, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Microsoft SQL Server, Microservices (AKS), Azure Service Bus. AWS (Lambda, SQS/SNS, EC2, Fargate), and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes) technologies.