Engineering Lead

What We Are Looking For Hands-on Engineering Experience Strong hands-on experience designing, building, integrating or operating production-grade digital systems. Ability to contribute directly to technical solutioning, architecture, code reviews, technical spikes and engineering troubleshooting. Strong understanding of software engineering principles, system design, APIs, integration, cloud platforms, databases, data flows and operational support. Practical experience delivering secure, reliable and maintainable applications in real-world production environments. Technically credible with engineers, architects, vendors and stakeholders, with the ability to discuss implementation trade-offs confidently. Product Engineering Mindset Experienced across the full product lifecycle — from problem framing, discovery, and rapid experimentation to POC/POV validation, production rollout and continuous improvement. Comfortable working in a multidisciplinary product team with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders. Able to translate product goals and user needs into practical, iterative technical delivery. Strong judgement on when to optimise for speed, when to simplify, and when to invest in architecture, reliability, security and interoperability. Outcome-oriented, ensuring engineering decisions are linked to user value, organisational goals and public good. Technical Leadership Proven ability to lead engineering workstreams or small engineering teams while remaining hands-on. Experience setting technical direction, architecture principles, coding standards, and delivery practices. Ability to guide engineers and vendors towards consistent, high-quality engineering outcomes. Strong ability to identify technical risks, remove blockers and make pragmatic engineering decisions under constraints. Experience building engineering practices from the ground up would be highly valuable. Secure, Reliable and Maintainable by Design Strong appreciation of secure-by-design and reliable-by-design principles. Experience with DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, logging, incident response and root-cause analysis. Ability to design and operate systems that are maintainable, cost-effective, and adaptable to future needs. Experience managing technical debt, modernising legacy systems or improving maintainability over time. Familiarity with government, enterprise or regulated environments would be advantageous. Architecture and Systems Thinking Ability to connect product-level engineering decisions to broader enterprise architecture, interoperability, reuse, and platform strategy. Strong systems-thinking mindset, with the ability to manage dependencies across systems, teams, vendors, and platforms. Ability to simplify complex technical landscapes and translate them into practical engineering roadmaps. Experience working with cloud platforms, data platforms, AI-enabled systems, workflow platforms, geospatial systems or high-volume citizen/business-facing services would be advantageous. Collaboration and Communication Strong communicator who can explain technical issues, options, and risks clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Able to work closely with Product Leads and Design Leads to make balanced decisions across user needs, technical feasibility, and business value. Comfortable engaging senior management, business owners, cybersecurity teams, infrastructure teams, engineers, and vendors. Builds confidence through sound judgement, transparency, empathy and practical delivery experience. Engineering Culture and Capability Building Passionate about building strong engineering practices and uplifting engineering capability. Able to coach engineers, apprentices, and vendor teams in modern engineering practices. Demonstrates ownership, accountability, curiosity, and continuous learning. Keeps current with modern practices such as cloud engineering, platform automation, AI-assisted development, and DevSecOps. Willing to be both a leader and a builder — setting direction while also rolling up sleeves to help the team deliver. Preferred Experience Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Engineering or a related discipline, with significant experience (typically 8+ years) designing, building and operating digital products and platforms. Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across the full product lifecycle, from problem discovery and prototyping thr…